(Page 2 of 39) - Violent Death After Communism authored by Treyger, Elina.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a collapse of a political and economic order, but
also of a public order. The newly independent states (NIS) were consequently faced with
the task of restoring public order, in addition to establishing political authority and viable
post-communist economies. The fate of the latter projects have received a lion’s share of
scholarly and policy attention, for understandable reasons. This paper focuses on the
collapse and restoration of public order across the ex-Soviet lands, in a minimalist sense
of that concept. First, I propose that peacetime public order may be gauged by the extent
of a state’s “violent death problem,” or the frequency with which residents die as a result
of purposeful violence. Thusly conceived, the magnitude of the violent death problem
varies wildly across the NIS. Further, I argue that since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the distribution of the violent death problem among its successor states does not easily
accord with certain common assumptions about post-Soviet lawlessness. Implicit in a
hopeful view of an imminently possible “transition” to liberal market democracy, is a
presumption that lawlessness and violence are simultaneously transient costs of such
transition, and continuous costs of insufficient reform and poor governance. The fate of
public order is commonly linked to the success of political, legal and economic
transformations: creating properly functioning legal and political systems and prosperous
free market economies is ultimately expected to dampen violence and lawlessness, and
reinforce a less violent, more orderly social order. I suggest that such a hopeful view does
not adequately deal with the dynamics of violent death after communism. At least in the
first ten-twelve years of independence, achieving economic prosperity, liberalizing the
political regime and building up the rule of law has not corresponded to lower levels of
violent death across the FSU. The factors that seem to shed some light on the cross-
national differences are durable socio-economic characteristics and historical legacies,
which are likely to remain unaffected by political or economic reforms.

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After a minimalist definition, “public order” can be deemed achieved when citizens’ lives
are effectively protected both from other fellow citizens and state officials. Effective
protection of life means, at the least, that the probability of a citizen dying a violent death
at the hands of another is low, or, in the locution employed in this paper, when the violent
death problem is minimal.

During the times of civil peace, citizens of every society face some probability of dying a
violent death as a result of others’ purposeful actions. If we had an ability to observe
perfectly the numbers of externally- and purposefully- caused deaths, then high levels
may point to a number of possible underlying dynamics: state weakness and failure to
deter common criminals; state failure to reign in powerful force-wielding groups, be
these organized crime syndicates or violent political opposition movements; or on the
contrary, state repression of its citizens by forcible means resulting in their death. The
first two scenarios are of a state that has not yet acquired or has lost the Weberian
monopoly on the legitimate use of force; the third is of a state that possesses the
monopoly on the use force, but is using it tyrannically. All of these possibilities are
problematic and undesirable. Any of these possibilities, is a cause for concern quite apart
from the nature of the political regime or the level of material well-being of the
population.