Unbroken links?: from imperial human capital to post-communist modernisation

The article explores imperial human capital affects on current human capital and democracy variations in Russia's regions based on author-constructed datasets with imperial and post-communist statistics. Pre-communist education is a significant predictor of modernisation, which in studies of Russian regions explains a large share of regional democratic variation. Pre-communist education also apparently positively affects post-communist democracy. The communists did not build on a clean slate; nor did they overwrite pre-communist human capital stocks in the regions. The spatially uneven structural conditions related to frontier settlement and population movements after the emancipation of the serfs may also have a bearing on human capital variations.