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

• In Event: Interdisciplinary History II: The Soviet Union

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 under their rule is mixed. To determine whether the professional background of national founders influenced regime trajectories in this region, this paper uses a regression discontinuity design and traces representative, extreme, and deviant cases amongst the first post-soviet generation of political leaders.

Author

• Matthew Reichert, Harvard U