ABSTRACT
Ignoring the past encourages a misunderstanding of the present. Today’s political institutions were not chosen by today’s governors; they are, as Vladimir Putin has recognized, an inescapable legacy of the past. At the start of transformation, there was much talk about societies being in transition, but less was said about where they were coming from. In Central and Eastern Europe the past was what people were trying to escape from. However, in most successor states of the Soviet Union new institutions were viewed as the problem, because they supplanted what was familiar in the past. To understand what the consequences of transformation are, we first need to understand the system that was in place before transformation.
