Lenin: a Rational Choice Institutionalist

Over this stretch in Peru, I left a couple of books at home (like the formal modeling book I was hoping to use to teach myself about game theory), but I brought with me an old historical account of the last days of the Romanov regime in Russia from the 1960s. The book, Nicholas and Alexandra, is a long one, but a pretty interesting and entertaining account of the rule of Czar Nicholas. There's probably newer and better scholarship available out there, but for $2 at the used book store, it was a pretty good deal.

The Russian Revolution might be a "hard case" for Avner Greif's rational choice theory of institutional development and change; Greif basically argues that new institutional forms tend to be modeled on older institutional forms, because of all of the uncertainties tied up in creating entirely new institutional models. The Russian Revolution--in some ways a clean break from the Russian monarchist past

One of the interesting things that has struck me about the story is the extent to which it describes a Russian Revolution which wasn't really very revolutionary at all, at least in an institutional sense. The Russian Revolutionaries, following a particular Social Democratic or Marxist ideology essentially adopted older institutional forms--forms which had a long history in Russia or elsewhere.

In 1905, in an attempt to hang on to the throne, the Czar adopted an elected parliament--this became the focus of the February revolution of 1917. In this "revolution," power passed from an autocratic monarch to an elected legislature which had been created twelve years prior--and an institutional form which had existed in a similar form in other more democratic nations for hundreds of years.

At about the same time, a "Soviet," which was a similar elected legislature, though less well-developed institutionally and which was more democratic, in that more people were allowed to participate in its selection, sprang up alongside the Duma.

Ultimately, the Soviet (and other regional Soviets through the country, which were similar institutional structures) superseded the power of the Duma (in the October revolution), which led, ultimately, to the dictatorship of Lenin.

Although these are significant changes in terms of the way the Russian Empire was ruled, all of these changes took place along the lines suggested by Greif--that newer institutional forms effectively developed based on older institutional forms.

One might imagine, based on some of the ideologies of Russian revolutionaries, that the institutional forms of the Soviet Union might have, otherwise, developed very differently. It is theoretically possible, for example, that the Soviet government might have been formed along Anarchist, Revolutionary Syndicalist, or Communitarian lines. But the actual outcome seems to suggest that even radicals like Lenin and Trotsky rely greatly upon the past for their understanding of what the appropriate institutional response for a given situation should be.