![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Egalitarianism is one of the key elements of the communist ideology, yet some of the former communist countries are among the most unequal in the world in terms of income distribution. How does the communist legacy affect income inequality in the long run? The goal of this article is to investigate this question by looking at a sample of sub-national regions of Russia. To be able to single out the mechanisms of the communist legacy effects more carefully, we look at a particular aspect of the communist legacy – the legacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). We demonstrate that the sub-national regions of Russia, which had higher CPSU membership rates in the past, are characterised by lower income inequality. This, however, appears to be unrelated to the governmental redistribution policies; we link lower inequality to the prevalence of informal networks.
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to the participants of the DGO Economic Section conference in Berlin for helpful comments. In particular, they appreciate the suggestions of Tomila Lankina, Olga Popova and Maria Kravtsova. We appreciate the suggestions of two referees, which helped us a lot in terms of improving the article. We are also grateful to Julia Blaut for her excellent research assistance and her help with data collection. The study has been funded within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. All mistakes remain our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
3. Interestingly, for Poland, Grosfeld and Senik (Citation2010) show that the demand for redistribution increases in times of transition: while at the beginning people welcome the departure from the old system, over time they become more willing to support policies leading to the expansion of the welfare state. In Russia, already at the beginning of transition, the attitude towards growing inequality was vastly negative.
4. For a historical anecdote see http://world.lib.ru/m/muradow_j/conform-01.shtml
5. Gokmen and Kofanov (Citationforthcoming) suggest that poor incentives for sub-national governors can be seen as part of a long-lasting historical legacy present since the pre-revolutionary era.
6. In recent years, Russia has experienced a growth in labour protests though (https://www.rbc.ru/politics/07/11/2017/59fc780e9a794772d40d85d1), and in 2012, which will be the baseline year for our analysis, the country had just recovered from a major economic crisis. However, these protests do not appear to be threatening for the stability of the regime to the extent that the governors should become immensely concerned with them. On protests in Russian regions see also Lankina (Citation2015) and Lankina and Voznaya (Citation2015).
7. Of course, in this case one has to be cautious regarding the possible mechanisms of the horizontal value diffusion from the CPSU members across the society: it is not clear why the less successful would emulate the anti-redistribution preferences of the more successful.
8. Backhaus (Citation2008), for the case of the former German Democratic Republic, actually suggests that former communists created vast informal business networks after the collapse of the communist regime. In Russia, where the social and political environment towards former party members was even less hostile, they did have even stronger chances for developing these networks.
10. Data for 2012.
11. Note that for many countries data on income distribution are not available.
12. All variables are from the Rosstat data, except education, and, if not indicated otherwise, for the year 2012.
13. We use average real GDP growth rates in the decade preceding the year of our observation, i.e. 2002–2012.
14. Since, according to Kuznets (Citation1955), the link between inequality and growth could be non-linear, we also estimate a regression controlling for the squared growth rates or squared income per capita as well, but our results do not change.
16. Note that the language of counterfactual analysis by construction could give the impression of a causal link between the CPSU membership rate in the past and contemporary inequality. We acknowledge that our analysis reports conditional correlations rather than causal effects; we discuss this issue in greater detail in the concluding section of the article.
17. By performing this analysis, we still exclude three autonomous okrugs (Nenets, Khanty Mansi and Yamalo Nenets) from our sample, as is typically done in research on Russia.
18. Note that some research indicates that informal relations in Russian society became more important in the 2010s as opposed to the second half of the first decade of the 2000s (see Kravtsova, Citation2012). Our study looks at the effect of the CPSU legacy on the income inequality in the 2010s, i.e. at the period when informality could have gained in importance. This again makes the interpretation of our results through the informal networks more likely.
19. As a caveat, we have to acknowledge that some of the redistribution implemented by the regional governments does not go through the regional budgets and may be associated with informal pseudo-budgetary institutions that private companies ‘voluntarily’ make contributions to, which are outside the official fiscal system and under the control of the governors.