Js Kopstein

Leninism and the central role that violence played in it is most commonly presented as
a hindrance to democratic development in post-communist Eastern Europe. This paper
reconsiders this proposition in light of the classics of comparative historical analysis.
These classic works maintain that the long-term consequences of revolutionary violence
sometimes counteract its short-term anti-democratic impact. Social change
unleashed by revolution can contribute to the emergence of democracy in subsequent
periods by removing pre-modern barriers to democracy. Two aspects of Leninist violence
are highlighted as having such effects: forced modernization and the civilizing
process. Communist modernization altered pre-modern social structures which had
served as impediments to democracy prior to the Leninist seizure of power. The resulting
social structures and the values reinforced by the communist version of the “civilizing
process,” patterned on those of bourgeois conventions of the early twentieth
century, helped some post-communist countries overcome obstacles to the introduction
of liberal democracy encountered in earlier attempts in the region after World War I.