State-Building and the Legacies of Leninist Violence.

Recent difficult and negative experiences with democracy promotion indicates that democratic proceduralism in the absence of a well established state and settled identity conflicts may be meaningless. Parties and parliaments have completely different functions and meanings where there is no modern state apparatus. In this paper we concentrate on state building and evaluate the legacies of violent state building on the Leninist world for post-communist politics. Students of the communist world never agreed on the nature of the Leninist state. Huntington considered communism to be a viable alternative to political experience of the West because of its capacity to channel socially mobilized groups into political life; Jowitt, although accepting the Huntingtonian logic initially, eventually cast it aside completely and maintained that Leninist regimes had come to replicate the weak-state clientelism of the “third world.” The experience of the post-communist world suggests that the real impact of the Leninist state-building experience needs to be reevaluated because the reality falls somewhere between the two extremes. In some cases, communist regimes produced the first genuine Weberian state apparatuses that had ever existed on these territories and these apparatuses were ripe for democratic leadership (and non-democratic leadership) by the 1980s. This paper revisits the Leninist experience in light of the theoretical literature on state-building and an empirical literature of selection Asian, Eurasian, and European experiences.