The Origins of Post-Soviet Autocracy in the University and Creative Union

• In Event: Remodeling Authoritarianism: Conceptual Approaches with Empirical Foundations

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, seven of the fifteen new post-Soviet heads of state had worked in academic or cultural professions prior to first taking political office. Many of these nationalist founding fathers had been Soviet dissidents and self-proclaimed liberal democrats, but the actual empirical record of democratic quality after they came to power is mixed. Scores on Varieties of Democracy’s “liberal democracy” measure for the post-Soviet states led by those seven, immediately after independence, ranged from 0.79 in Lithuania, led by a former Professor of Music and Theater to 0.25 in Georgia, led by a former Professor of Literature and Languages.

Constraints on democratic liberties in these new Republics following the Soviet collapse were often tied to new nationalisms. Here, a range of policies designed to favor the titular nationality were enacted and contested. Such policies sought to depart from the Soviet model of multinationalism, which enshrined a plurality of national identities within a set of common, Communist political institutions. If such policies flowed from nationalist platforms developed by anti-Soviet opposition prior to 1991, then we should find the writers, artists, and professors that often led these movements behind policy decisions that helped to decide regime trajectories of these post-Soviet states.

An exemplar of this post-communist battle between democracy and nationalism is Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the writer, philologist, and literary critic turned ardent nationalist that was elected to become the first president of independent Georgia in May of 1991. Gamsakhurdia had excellent democratic credentials: he had co-founded the Georgian Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights, he was the first Georgian member of Amnesty international, and he co-founded and chaired the Georgian Helsinki Group. However, as President, Gamsakhurdia closed down newspapers, restricted rights of assembly, and imprisoned political opponents. Many of these autocratic measures were a response to unrest amongst Georgia’s ethnic minorities, especially in South Ossetia, who protested new Georgianization policies in language and education associated with Gamsakhurdia’s “Georgia for Georgians” platform.

Did the professional background of national founders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia influence regime trajectories? Were the nationalist grievances that brought them to power during the Soviet collapse reflected in the policies they enacted once in power?

This paper answers the former question using a regression discontinuity design that, following Szakonyi (2018), exploits close elections in new post-Soviet democracies. Using original data, I code the professional background of founding heads of state and core officials in what had been Soviet republics and autonomous republics – territories that became independent or federal units with substantial autonomy from the metropole. I identify whether candidates with a background in cultural professions, proxied for by affiliation with an academic institution or membership in a Soviet creative union, that won office by a small margin exerted a causal effect on a range of regime measures, compared to candidates with similar backgrounds that lost by a small margin.

To answer the latter question, I use the same data to select a set of representative, extreme, and deviant cases. I use these cases to trace the history of specific nationalist policies that influenced low democracy scores to their origins in Soviet-era nationalist movements.

This study builds on and sharpens new research on effects of professional background on candidates in this region (Szakonyi, 2018), especially in parties that formed out of broader social movements (Kruszewska, 2016). It also challenges recent work on the relationship between ethnic pluralism and democratic politics in Eurasia (Way, 2015).

Author

• Matthew J Reichert, Harvard University