Remembering Communism During and After Communism (review article)

Marxism after communism

It is with apprehension but also conviction that I defend Marxism today1apprehension because we live in a period that is suspicious of visions of alternative futures, skeptical of grand historical narrative, dismissive of materialist explanations, rejecting of class analysis while tolerating capitalism's defects and pathologies as unavoidable and natural; conviction because we live in a period ...

The fallacy of communism.

The political economy of change after communism

I survey the first twenty-five years of economic change in the former communist countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While diverging sharply from one another, these countries have converged economically and politically towards their nearest neighbors outside the Soviet bloc. The typical country experienced a spurt of economic reform in the early 1990s, slowing dramatically from around 1...

A Normal Country: Russia After Communism

D uring the 1990s, Russia underwent extraordinary transformations. It changed from a communist dictatorship into a multiparty democracy in which officials are chosen in regular elections. Its centrally planned economy was reshaped into a capitalist order based on markets and private property. Its army withdrew peacefully from eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, allowing the latter t...

Why do firms hide? Bribes and unofficial activity after communism

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden ‘unofficial’ activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse bureaucratic corruption, greater incidence of mafia protection, and have less faith in the court system. Our f...