Development, Dependency, and Devolution: The Anomalous Political Economy of Communist and Postcommunist Societies

The problem of situating economic transitions from communism to postcommunism within more general theories of comparative political economy has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. In this paper the author argues that the reason for the lack of integration between these two literatures is that the dynamics of the formation and decline of the Stalinist socioeconomic system remain basically anomalous for each of the three dominant theoretical frameworks in the field of political economy: the modernization approach, the world-systems approach, and the rational choice approach. Moreover, none of these paradigms by itself appears to account satisfactorily for the diverse economic trends in postcommunist societies. Modernization theory is apparently consistent with economic ‘development’ in the most successful areas within the Leninist and post-Leninist world; world-systems theory appears to fit the type of ‘dependency’ emerging in places such as Central Asia and the Caucasus; rational choice analysis elucidates the continuing ‘devolution’ of Leninist state structures in places where rent-seeking bureaucrats still directly or indirectly control most of the national wealth—but no single approach explains the overall pattern of mixed results. It is concluded that making sense of the puzzling emergence, destruction, and aftermath of the Stalinist economic model requires the integration of ideological modes of coordinating collective action into a more comprehensive political economy paradigm.