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Communist rule left a strong imprint on the development of Eastern European countries, but the precise mechanisms and directions of this legacy effect are subject to debate. This article looks at the legacies of giant infrastructural projects, which played an important role in the ideology and policy practice of communist regimes. Using the natural experiment of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), we investigate the influence of this project on post-communist voting behavior. We show that the BAM legacy reduces the share of votes for United Russia, the party of power of Putin's regime, and leads to a larger share of votes for the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). While the BAM legacy could be associated with a multitude of channels, we provide empirical evidence for at least one of them—the persistence of human capital, showing that BAM settlements are characterized by better educational outcomes than the control group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the long-run effect of the Soviet shadow economy on attitudes toward the market economy and competition in Georgia—a former Soviet republic known for the high prevalence of the shadow economy. We use the density of Soviet-era organized crime as a proxy for the local prevalence of shadow economy and instrument it with agroclimatic suitability for citrus fruits, exploiting the fact that citrus and other subtropical agricultural products were an object of shortage and illicit trade during the Soviet era. We show that the citrus-suitable parts of Georgia have a higher density of Soviet-era thieves-in-law and that survey respondents living in these areas are more likely to report lower preference toward state ownership of businesses and higher appreciation of competition. Higher social legitimacy of private entrepreneurship is likely to be behind these findings: employed respondents in citrus-producing areas rate fairness of their compensation higher than in the rest of Georgia when they have their own business and rate it lower when they work in the public sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]