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In the nearly quarter century since the collapse of communism, a great many outcomes in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, from patterns of democratic consolidation to state–society relations, have been attributed to legacies of the past. Yet despite the common goal of understanding the influence of the past, there is little consensus on how to conceptualize historical legacies. Through a focus on post-communist outcomes and their relation to prior outcomes and causal precursors, this article assesses what counts as a historical legacy and how legacies differ from non-legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does Eastern Europe contribute to the debate over EU’s democratic deficit from an electoral perspective? Does Eastern Europe challenge our theoretical understanding of what motivates European citizens to participate and express their opinions in European Parliamentary elections? While there is no overarching consensus in the academic community regarding these questions, this essay aims to illustrate how a deeper understanding of one post-communist case and a bottom-up perspective on attitudes and political behavior in one locale, Romania, allowed the researcher to delve deeper into the taken-for-granted dynamics that European citizens from the South, East, and West engage in when voting in European Parliamentary elections. The approach of “ethnographic sensibility” mentioned in the workshop’s discussions and illustrated in several contributions to this volume (see e.g. Kubik 2013; Knott 2015) constitutes then a useful starting point in deconstructing conventional knowledge. Moreover, during the process of moving up the ladder of generality and building inferences from one case study to a region, Eastern Europe still shares enough characteristics to deserve its own dummy variable, so to speak, in large-N continent-wide analyses covering the 2004 and 2009 European Parliamentary (EP) elections. Yet, as Joshua Tucker (2015) mentions in his contribution, it is unclear whether the historical legacies discussed at the workshop and further elaborated on by Grigore Pop-Eleches (2015) will continue to play a role in a priori distinguishing Eastern Europeans’ political attitudes and behaviors from other EU citizens in the South or West in future EP elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing up in Bulgaria during the “transition” years, as a then fifteen-year old, I spent the summer of 1990 queuing up at the neighborhood newsstand waiting for the daily delivery of freshly printed newspapers. Shortages of goods, including food and gasoline, caused long lines in front of many stores, but the crowd waiting at the kiosk was eager to read about the latest political developments, and especially popular were the newspapers published by the newly established opposition parties. While there was no scarcity of political news via television and radio, there was always something special about the print media, much of which, including entertainment weeklies, were such a novelty. Twenty or so years later, I spent another summer among newspapers, in the archives of the National Library in Sofia, poring through the pages and—with no digitization of archives—collecting photographs of news articles published before each of the national legislative elections since 1990. Much has changed in the media environment since then, yet the study of media in post-communist societies and especially its relations to voters, parties, and politics in general is still in its infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critical analysis of the view that Marx’s critique of capitalism provides the analytical lenses necessary to understand post-communist transformations. The author examines the problematic premises underpinning this view—for example, that capitalism can be created by design, and that in the early 1990s the former “second world” constituted a tabula rasa—and insists that a proper answer to the question “How did capitalism emerge in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union?” is yet to be given. The text also identifies the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical difficulties that might ensue if analyses of post-communist politics are reduced to a critique of neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the significant and resilient pre-communist, communist, and post-communist diversity of the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The empirical evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that both types of legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of post-communist transitions. Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform communist imprint in areas such as primary education and the importance of the state sector in the economy, in other areas of socioeconomic development, either communism was unable to reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect to GDP/capita or the size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental imprint has been fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as in the case of the massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist countries). In political terms, there is an interesting contrast between institutional trajectories (such as regime type), which largely follow pre-communist developmental differences, and individual political attitudes and behavior, where communist exceptionalism generally trumps post-communist diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leninism and the central role that violence played in it is most commonly presented as a hindrance to democratic development in post-communist Eastern Europe. This paper reconsiders this proposition in light of the classics of comparative historical analysis. These classic works maintain that the long-term consequences of revolutionary violence sometimes counteract its short-term anti-democratic impact. Social change unleashed by revolution can contribute to the emergence of democracy in subsequent periods by removing pre-modern barriers to democracy. Two aspects of Leninist violence are highlighted as having such effects: forced modernization and the civilizing process. Communist modernization altered pre-modern social structures which had served as impediments to democracy prior to the Leninist seizure of power. The resulting social structures and the values reinforced by the communist version of the “civilizing process,” patterned on those of bourgeois conventions of the early twentieth century, helped some post-communist countries overcome obstacles to the introduction of liberal democracy encountered in earlier attempts in the region after World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors cite the 25th anniversary of the beginning of Eastern Europe's post-communist era and note several papers in the issue resulted from an invitation to former editors of the publication to reflect on the realities of the era relative to expectations.