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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, keith.darden@yale.edu
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, abusse@umich.edu

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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24 Janos (fn. 12).

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50 Considerable experimental evidence supports the notion of a direct causal relationship between schooling and abstract thought and reliance on general concepts not drawn from experience. See the discussion of these experiments in Luria, A. R., “Towards the Problem of the Historical Nature of Psychological Processes,” International Journal of Psychology 6, no. 4 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Scribner and Cole (fn. 20); and especially idem, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. As demonstrated most persuasively by the experiments conducted by Scribner and Cole (pp. 130–33), with the Vai tribe of Liberia, the shift toward abstraction is linked only to Western-style schooling (that is, curricular content), not to the development of literacy or written languages of the type of rote memorization typical of Islamic madrassas.

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

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64 For example, Hungarian postwar inflation was the worst the country had experienced. Similarly, industrialization plans in the Czech lands failed largely because the country was already industrialized, had few natural resources, and had been dependent on foreign trade, largely with Germany.

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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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