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The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Keith Darden
Affiliation:
Yale University, [email protected]
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, [email protected]

Abstract

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As communist regimes collapsed in the years 1989—91, communist parties and leaders exited power in roughly half the cases. The causes and the impact of this variation have generated considerable controversy. The authors show that the combined timing and content of the introduction of mass literacy was responsible for generating the national standards and comparisons that either sustained the legitimacy of communist party rule or led to its rapid and complete demise during the collapse of communist regimes. Mass literacy explains more of the patterns of the communist exit than do structural, modernization, or communist legacy accounts, and it provides a clear and sustained causal chain.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

References

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62 The Serbian Orthodox church claimed a kinship with its Russian Orthodox brethren.

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73 According to State Department surveys conducted through the 1990s, the share of respondents with a “favorable” opinion of Russia in 1994 was 74 percent in Azerbaijan, 78 percent in Kazakhstan, 86 percent in Uzbekistan, 83 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 90 percent in Armenia (up from 43 percent in 1992), but only 36 percent in Georgia. See Faranda, Regina, “Ties That Bind, Opinions That Divide” (Manuscript, U.S. State Department Opinion Surveys, 2001)Google Scholar; see also Laitin, David D., Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Nationality in Estonia and Bashkortostan (Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1995)Google Scholar.

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