| This dissertation draws attention to the Soviet roots of the post-Soviet social order. It argues that seven decades of Soviet state-led development and population management reshaped social orders in a manner that limited the potential for social cooperation after the collapse of the communist regime. A number of pathologies plaguing post-communist Russia, from the astoundingly high levels of violent crime to political disengagement, may be conceptualized as breakdowns of social cooperation. High levels of violent crime indicate not only a deficient state capacity for crime control, but also a weak social capacity for cooperation in the task of informal control; similarly, levels of electoral participation correspond to citizens' willingness to cooperate in the task of democratic self-governance. The weakness of social cooperation in its various forms in post-communist Russia, I argue, is rooted in its communist past --- in particular, in the extent to which local social orders were overturned and reshaped by coercive state-led modernization. Using a variety of historical sources, I document the legacy bestowed by coercive and artificial development and population management strategies, showing that its burdens are distributed unequally across Russia. I demonstrate that the burden of the Soviet legacy may be approximated quantitatively with historic population data; so understood, the legacy burden helps greatly to account for the striking variation in homicide mortality across Russia's sub-national regions. Aspects of the same legacy also help explain the cross-regional variation in voter turnout in early post-communist elections. In sum, the distinct geography of command and coercion in the Soviet period is reproduced after the Soviet collapse as a geography of weak cooperation, whether for the purposes of containing interpersonal violence or participating in determining the country's political future. |
