11 - The Origin and Persistence of Legacies

Summary

This chapter studies three interdependent questions. First, it looks at what we call the “temporal depth” of the legacies: how far we can go into the past to observe a link between the variation in the CPSU membership rates across regions and the contemporary social and political outcomes? Second, we study the persistence of legacies: how does the effect of the CPSU legacies change if we look at more recent indicators of Russia’s regional development as opposed to earlier ones. We document high persistence of the effects of the CPSU legacy: while for some indicators the CPSU effects decrease over time (although remain significant), there are indicators for which the CPSU effects actually become stronger. Third, we study whether the CPSU legacy affected the variation across Russian regions in the 1990s (as opposed to the 2000s and the 2010s - i.e., the period we study in other chapters of this book).