In terms of answering empirical questions, one should consider that the rise of post-Soviet bad governance was a consequence of the purposeful actions of political and economic actors who aimed to maximize benefits for themselves during the process of redistribution of power and resources in the turbulent post-Soviet environment. For example, in the case of RZhD, the governance of the biggest state-owned company by Yakunin did not result from the legacies passed down in this sector or in the Russian economy as a whole. Neither Kaganovich nor his MPS successors ever dreamed of a degree of freedom like Yakunin’s in arbitrarily governing their respective domains. Of course, political decay during the last decades of the Soviet Union greatly contributed to large-scale exploitation of public resources for the private purposes of top state managers, and instances of bad governance such as the infamous “Cotton Affair” in Uzbekistan in the 1980s were most probably just the tip of the iceberg.31 Overall, however, in the Soviet Union instances of uncontrolled rent-seeking were limited at that time and never considered a norm of elite behavior. Rather, RZhD was turned into its CEO’s fiefdom after the distribution of rent sources among the members of the post-Soviet “winning coalition”32 led by Putin and his close allies. The maximization of power in politics and the maximization of rents in the economy should be perceived as rational goals of the ruling groups who achieved them in several post-Soviet countries in the wake of political regime changes and market economic reforms. Some analyses of the dynamics of political and economic changes after the Soviet collapse have demonstrated that complex transformations make it easier to achieve these goals, where otherwise they could be more difficult.33 The new politico-economic order has served as an instrument of the ruling groups, and institutions have maintained its continuity and solidified the existing configurations of political and economic actors. Unlike the legacy argument, a focus on purposeful institution-building treats post-Soviet bad governance as an outcome of conscious “poisoning” of the social and political organism by certain actors belonging to the ruling groups. However, identifying possible cures for this kind of disease is far from straightforward.
That said, there is no reason to deny that “history matters”34 for an understanding of bad governance. Rather, the question is framed differently: How exactly did this “mattering” of the past become a constituent pattern in the practice of governing the state today and tomorrow? Regarding governance, the legacy of the past is loosely understood as a set of historically established obstacles to good governance that emerged before the Soviet collapse for various reasons and persisted for an indefinite period. But this perception of a legacy fails to explain why it has a different impact on various countries and policy areas and how exactly it affects post-Soviet institutions and practices. In search of alternatives to determinism, Stephen Kotkin and Mark Beissinger redefine “legacy” as “a durable causal relationship between past institutions and policies on subsequent practices or beliefs, long beyond the life of the regimes, institutions, and policies that gave birth to them.”35 They also outline several causal mechanisms for transferring institutions and practices from the past to the present and the future, including: material or “parameter setting”; organizational and institutional or “fragmentation” and “translation”; and ideational or “cultural schemata.” Many legacies of parameter setting relate to the limitation of certain institutional and/or policy choices due to material constraints left over from the past; organizational and institutional fragmentation involves direct inheritance of some parts of previous institutions from the old regime, while translation means using old institutions for new purposes; and cultural schemata refers to perceptions generated by past regime practices that make a certain sort of conduct either normal or unacceptable.36 Parameter setting results from certain limits set by the physical and technological infrastructure inherited from the Soviet past that posed major barriers to structural reforms.37 By contrast, cultural schemata, modes of thinking and perceiving reality, were embedded in the past but outlived it and gave birth to the new post-Soviet normative ideal, which could be labeled a “good Soviet Union.”38 This has served as the basis for a “mental model”39 for post-Soviet elites and societies and affected organizational and institutional legacies to a great degree as a normative ideal.
One might argue that various legacies of the past affect the present and the future mostly because of how they are transferred. This is especially true for ideational legacies: “history matters” if certain actors can use it purposively for achieving their goals in various areas, including governing the state. The time horizon for the impact of these legacies cannot be indefinitely long. In post-Soviet Eurasia, it is relevant for the recent life experience of one or two generations who often interpreted the Soviet collapse and subsequent post-Soviet political and economic changes as a major trauma and framed their perceptions of the late-Soviet experience as a paradise lost. When it comes to the mechanisms for bringing these legacies into the current agenda, material, organizational, and institutional legacies impose high costs on improving the quality of governance and contribute to the preservation of the status quo. But the scale of these costs may decrease over time because of the emergence and spread of new institutions and practices not embedded in the past. Meanwhile, ideational legacies define understanding of the means and possible goals of the process of institution-building and serve as tools of ruling groups in this process.
In essence, the “legacy of the past” is largely a socially constructed phenomenon in post-Soviet Eurasia and beyond and should be regarded not as a structural constraint but as an agency-driven phenomenon. Regarding governing the state, cultural schemata work as instruments for maintaining bad governance in two mutually related ways. First, they establish a retrospective vector of public discussion where the Soviet past is considered the main (if not only) “point of departure.” History is not only a subject for historians but penetrates all aspects of public life in the region. The imagined past experience has become a normative marker in projecting the future of post-Soviet Eurasia, including but not limited to state governance. This is why previous institutions and practices have become building blocks for institution-building and policy-making. Fragmentation and translation serve as means to achieve these goals. Second, referring to the past has become the key argument in legitimating political and policy choices, other mechanisms of governance, institutions, and policies not related to the past (irrespective of their adherence to best practices of good governance) are often not perceived as legitimate by society at large. In a sense, the instrumental use of such a legacy in Russia is not so different to the slogan “Make America Great Again,” so vigorously and successfully promoted by Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential election campaign. In other words, ideational legacies (in Russia, in the United States, or elsewhere) are phenomena intentionally produced by elites to serve their political goals of power maximization.