The role of external factors in political transition is a new area of the research in the democratization studies. While a number of outstanding studies develop this topic looking primarily on the external dimension of democracy, the question on the role of external non-democratic factors had not yet been addressed as the main focus. This paper aims to fill this gap. It also aims to disentangle the concept of international dimension of regime transition and to single out the component of foreign trade. The paper analyzes the impact of the international trade links between the post-Soviet states (PSS) on sub-national political regimes in Russia. The article addresses this interconnection in theoretical framework of external impact of transition. The trade links between PSSs and their regions have been developed for about a century during the Soviet regime and some of them even existed before then in Tsarist Russia. We hypothesize that this century-long variable had been one of the important factors in regime transition in the regions of Russia. We find that the post-Soviet trade causes decline in the level of democracy of sub-national regions. Statistical calculations demonstrate robust results even when a wide range of control variables is taken into account. To address the puzzle of causality of external mechanisms, interviews and analysis of case-studies´ methods are employed. The findings presented in this paper have wider implications for both area studies and for the theoretical studies of democratization.
