How was a new infrastructure of revenue-collection instituted after the collapse of Soviet-type regimes in Eastern Europe? This article suggests that currently available answers to this question are unsatisfactory. Building upon insights derived from the literature on fiscal sociology and from Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of modern “tax states,” it outlines a new approach to the study of various phenomena related to revenue-collection in postcommunism. More specifically, I examine a set of empirical and theoretical issues related to the reemergence of a taxpayer as having a cultural role, the reconfiguration of the bureaucratic apparatuses bequeathed by the old regime, and the recreation of trustworthy national currencies. Having identified important gaps in our understanding of the transformative processes that engulfed the region after 1989, the paper introduces a more comprehensive research program focused on the context-specific challenges inherent in the attempt to re-establish tax states in the formerly communist countries.

The paper offers an answer to one of the most intriguing questions about post-communist politics: why did the infrastructure of governance deteriorate considerably immediately after the collapse of the old regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet UnionŒ The analysis delineates broader themes derived from Charles Tilly’s writings on the historical sociology of state formation, and brings these themes to bear upon the study of post-’89 institutional transformations—a line of inquiry that is unjustifiably neglected in mainstream inquiries into the causes and manifestations of post-communist ‘state weakness.’ It compares post-communism—conceptualized as a historically specific period of state building—with earlier episodes of state formation, particularly in early modern Europe and thus sheds analytical light on the factors that brought about the fluctuation of ‘stateness’ and militated against the maintenance of viable state structures in the former Soviet world.

This paper examines the relations between postcommunist states and the powerful economic groups that dominated the early stages of postcommunist economic restructuring. The main argument is that the strategic actions of “winners” systematically undermine the capacity of state institutions and the organizational coherence of administrative agencies. Against the background of a detailed study of one particular story of “postcommunist success”, the rise of Multigroup in Bulgaria, I explore the concrete manifestations of “state weakness” in postcommunism, the nature of redistributive conflicts the former socialist societies, and the historical specificity of the processes undermining the organizational bases of governance in the former Soviet world.