Unbroken Links? From Imperial Human Capital to Post-Communist Modernisation

Abstract

The article explores imperial human capital affects on current human capital and democracy variations in Russia's regions based on author-constructed datasets with imperial and post-communist statistics. Pre-communist education is a significant predictor of modernisation, which in studies of Russian regions explains a large share of regional democratic variation. Pre-communist education also apparently positively affects post-communist democracy. The communists did not build on a clean slate; nor did they overwrite pre-communist human capital stocks in the regions. The spatially uneven structural conditions related to frontier settlement and population movements after the emancipation of the serfs may also have a bearing on human capital variations.

Notes

¹A boost to overall male literacy was given when the government instituted a requirement of literacy for all recruits to the army after military service became compulsory in 1874 (Mironov 1985).

²A log transformation of the data has been performed in order to deal with outlier cases that might skew the results and to facilitate the interpretation of effects of the logged variables on the dependent variable of interest.

³Arguably, this is what occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century among some segments of Russian society: while schooling was expanding many peasants relapsed into illiteracy because of low functional usage of literacy skills (Mironov 1985).

⁴See http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat/rosstatsite/main/, accessed 25 January 2012.

⁵Data for constructing the indicator were obtained from the website of the Federal Service of State Statistics, available at: http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat/rosstatsite/main/, accessed 25 January 2012. The openness score was fist constructed for, and employed in, Lankina and Getachew (2006).

⁶See http://atlas.socpol.ru/indexes/index_democr.shtml, accessed 25 January 2012.

⁷These data were obtained from the website of the Independent Institute of Social Politics, available at: http://atlas.socpol.ru/indexes/index_democr.shtml, accessed 25 January 2012.