Conceptualization of post-Soviet regime changes: Some intermediate results

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze the attempts to conceptualize post-Soviet regime changes that have been undertaken over the past thirty years. For convenience, all concepts are grouped around three main approaches. The first one examines regime transformations in the former USSR from the point of view of a possible transition to democracy (transition paradigm); the second approach emphasizes the continuity between the post-Soviet political regimes and previous ones, overlooking fundamental differences between them; the third approach assumes that the post-Soviet transition did take place, however, it was “autocracyto-autocracy transition” (from one-party communist dictatorship to hybrid regimes or consolidated personalistic autocracies). The author considers regime change as transformation of some basic formal and informal rules of the game that determine the functioning of a given political system (from the way of making key decisions and allocating resources to the main channels for recruiting to the elite). As a result, the author proves that the third approach is the most relevant for understanding post-Soviet politics. Inter alia, its advantage is that it allows us to fit post-Soviet studies into the wider field of comparative political science: the analysis of post-Soviet politics, on the one hand, can significantly enrich our ideas about “how dictatorships work” at large, on the other hand, empirical knowledge about autocracies outside post-Soviet Eurasia and theories built on this basis will help us to understand the nature of authoritarianism in Russia’s “near abroad”.