03/06/2026
Red Tape: Soviet Bureaucratic Empire and Institutional Legacies in the Third World
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, University of Pittsburgh
Scholarship on the institutional legacies of foreign rule has focused heavily on British and French colonial administration, while paying less attention to Soviet engagement across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America during the Cold War. This paper explores whether the Soviet Union’s most consequential legacy in many recipient states was bureaucratic. Through advisory missions, training programs, planning agencies, security cooperation, and party-state models, Soviet engagement helped construct centralized state architectures that concentrated political and economic authority. Yet these institutions were often grafted onto weak states. Rather than overcoming limited capacity, they frequently deepened it by weakening local autonomy, empowering coercive agencies, and producing bureaucracies better suited to control than governance. The paper traces how these institutional legacies endured as they served successive rulers, while also generating a cycle in which weak states relied on centralization to compensate for limited authority, thereby limiting the development of more legitimate, adaptive, and locally embedded institutions. As a first step in a broader research agenda, it examines how these dynamics may help explain divergent contemporary outcomes, from authoritarian consolidation to recurrent state failure.
Tel Aviv University | אוניברסיטת תל-אביב הפקולטה למדעי החברה - אוניברסיטת תל אביב
