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This article revisits the motives behind the Czechoslovak scheme "Russian Action", which granted thousands of Russian "migr"s residence and financial support in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, it looks at the efforts to bring to Czechoslovakia Russian civil war refugees living in Constantinople. Historians have conventionally focused on Prague as the home to intellectual and cultural exiles from Russia and have also decreed that the "migr" policies of Czechoslovakia were driven principally by the humanitarian concerns of a liberal and democratic government. This article looks, instead, at the regime's deep-seated political motives, in particular its plans for a future, Bolshevik-free Russia, reconstructed under its guiding hand. In so doing, it raises questions about Czechoslovakia's self-image, ideology and place within the international hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah's intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin's state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin's state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists' correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success − in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the complex ethnic situation in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union as seen by Russian émigrés. Observers from many political perspectives identified that, whereas ethnic minorities often had a relatively well-developed sense of national identity within the empire/union, "Russia" was relatively undeveloped in terms of self-identification. This paradox affected both Soviet policy and émigré observers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the role of dissent in the making and remaking of contemporary international relations. The immediate aftermath of World War II was a period of interregnum. Prior security paradigms were exhausted while the three major political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, and left radicalism competed around the world. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 was meant to facilitate the creation of a new global governance model for the sake of peace. However, when in 1947 U.S. President Harry S. Truman made a speech to Congress in which he inaugurated a unilateral foreign policy doctrine premised on Soviet containment, he escalated ideological differences into security concerns. The Soviet Union responded by intensifying their investment in the U.N. and by developing a rhetorical playbook meant to aid smaller nations and oppressed peoples in challenging Western racism and colonialism. I examine the Soviets' dissent at the United Nations to highlight (1) how dissent figures differently across political ideological paradigms; (2) the connection between dissent and institutional forums in the development of global security models; and (3) the role of dissent as a form of material rhetoric that makes possible the creation of novel political alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way Soviet party and education officials dealt with female youth sexuality, in an effort to get it under control in order to ensure that Soviet girls grew up to be productive members of Soviet society. Many of the policies enacted by the regime reflected profound social conservatism of the majority of the top political leadership of the country and their great fear of youth, and particularly female, sexuality, as a force that could not be overcome, controlled or fully harnessed for the service of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The fledgling democracy of Russia is facing many challenges. Perhaps the most dangerous of all is the rise of an aggressive chauvinistic nationalism. Initially, political analysts regarded it as a “recent” phenomenon which was filling in the ideological vacuum left by communism. As time went on, however, scholars began to grasp its deep historical roots and investigate its ideological evolution during the Soviet period. In this process, they tended to focus on the “legitimate” domains of the Soviet system – such as the official press, the literary field of socialist realism, and so on – in order to investigate how “the Russian idea” overtly coexisted or even covertly prospered within the boundaries of officially sanctioned ideology. The main goal of this paper is to bring a new dimension to our understanding of contemporary Russian nationalism, by approaching the whole phenomenon from below. While focusing on the Soviet period, this paper traces the ideological evolution of Slavophiles and their selective degeneration into chauvinism at the social level. In particular, it analyzes the underground ideological field of samizdat – uncensored illicit publications – where Slavophiles played a significant role. In this way, we can hear the “unfiltered” voices of rising Russian nationalists during the Soviet era. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Purpose — The aim of this paper is to show that there could still be the possibility of a complementary relationship between capitalism and socialism (effective state), so that a higher human, social and economic order is realised. Design/methodology/approach — The paper is a meta-analytical study, which relied on secondary sources of information. It is a qualitative study that is based on conceptual analysis, theory building and "emic" perspective (authors' viewpoint). Findings — With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1998 and the fall of the famous Berlin Wall, the final victory or triumph of capitalism over its alternatives was heralded. This development saw nations, most especially the developing ones, rushing to infuse themselves into the capitalist global system, which is reflected by the opening of borders to the capitalist onslaught. However, soon after this euphoric capitalist triumphalism, capitalism seems to be heading to another cross-road, which is capable of undermining the aforesaid euphoria. As capital is now set to continue its accumulation, expansion and profitability, unemployment is on the rise, as government ability to create lasting employment has become ineffective due to the privatisation of the public sectors, retrenchment by private business, etc. The state of affairs is exacerbating the crime rate (both within nations and globally), ethnic and global tension, poverty and ill-feeling. Hence, there could be other better global alternatives to the current single capitalist triumphant orthodoxy. Practical implications — Socialism has failed and capitalism is in the process of failing. Therefore, the only hope left to resurrect socialism and resuscitate capitalism, is a complementary and comprehensive ideological order. In that sense, there is a need to complement the positive aspects of both ideologies. Originality/value — This paper is original, since no other paper has taken up the topic of "Triumphant capitalism and the future of human, social and economic progress in the post-Cold War era". The suggestion given in the paper could help to achieve a higher level of human, social and economic progress in the post-Cold War era, most especially in the developing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role played by Soviet ideology during the perestroika reforms has not been fully analyzed because ideology has not been seen as a structural force influencing Soviet political life. This paper charts the effect that this neglect of ideology has had on some explanations of perestroika and seeks to redress the balance. Various ways of dealing with ideology during perestroika are examined and an alternative approach to Soviet ideology (viewing it as a discourse) is developed. This approach to Soviet ideology shows that it was a vital, but unstable, element of the Communist Party's power. The approach is then applied to the Gorbachev reforms to show how ideology played a crucial part in breaking up the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1985 onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissolution of the Soviet system in 1991 caused an economic collapse in all the successor states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The immediate consequence of the breakdown was the emergence of previously non-existent trade barriers. Further, economic and social instability spread and a huge proportion of the population in these countries sank into poverty. In the 1990s, most of the successors recorded a dramatic decline both in production and trade. Particularly the economies poor in resources still suffer the consequences of those events. It was not only the arbitrary distortion of trade relations, due to central planning, which required an adjustment of foreign trade relationships after 1991. To a greater degree, there was a country-specific reorientation in exports. However, for several decades, the integration in the economic space of the USSR has been essential for all these countries. Therefore, we expect that in recent years traditional economic relations are a major driving factor of foreign trade in the successor states. This paper deals with the impact of the traditional economic relations on the countries in the former Soviet Union. For that reason, an empirical analysis of foreign merchandise export trade is conducted for the period 1996-2009 and evidence for the importance of initial conditions is derived. The study focuses on Georgia, Russia and Ukraine as those countries efficaciously reflect and proxy the ambivalent economic development in the successor economies and present different paths of trade reorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Discusses the implications of Stalinism for politics in the Soviet Union. Implementation of grandiose schemes of industrial construction to transform the country's productive base within one decade; Arguments on the vast inefficiencies and structural imbalances generated by the command economy; Absence of market mechanisms regulating supply and demand.

This paper examines recent efforts to introduce a feminist movement in the USSR in the context of the historic interpretations of Marxism-Leninism on "the women's question." The author argues that the USSR has focused on some parts of Marxism and ignored others in defining its position on women's issues. Recent movements, both feminist and protofeminist, are described and analyzed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses liberal internationalism. This paper focuses on the basic philosophy of U.S. foreign policy which has guided the country in a unilateral global exercise of power. Since the Soviet Union power collapsed and changes are now in place, issues on neglected economic and social problems are now given more attention in the U.S. The policy which steered the nation in various foreign philosophies will hold the country in the new challenges and opportunities drawn from the new era of liberal internationalism.

Information about several papers discussed at a conference organized by interlegal democratic civic organizations in the Soviet Union and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on the outlook for democratization is presented. The conference discussions emphasize the urgency and enormity of the challenge of democratic force in the Soviet Union. Implementation of free and fair elections and decentralization of power emerges high on the subject for democratic change.

In supposedly postideological times, late Soviet propaganda seems to epitomize the futile practices of a moribund regime. Instead, the material practices of ideological transmission in the 1960s and 1970s Soviet Union urge us to reconsider how ideas gain mobilizing force in a variety of political settings. This article looks at the use of handmade artifacts and personalized performances in Soviet cultural work to argue that personal reproduction is a crucial mediating factor between counterintuitive, utopian ideas and lived experience. As comparisons between the Soviet case and post-Soviet movements show, semiotic slippages that take documented activity as evidence of broader social dynamism remain key to the sense of agency of mobilizing networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the technique of Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (KGB), the Soviet Union's Committee of State Security, to ensure compliance. It explores the preventive warnings developed by the KGB to isolate unhealthy political ideas and prevent them from spreading. It discusses the effectiveness of the preventive warnings in the eight years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tackles how preventive warnings become the shield of the state.

The article provides information on a research about the policy dilemma in terms of democratic theory as well as the problem of overlapping democracies. It states that the research was based from anthropological approaches to education policy and the concept of policy appropriation. It cites an ethographic study of the policy and practice of civic education in Estonia from 2001 to 2004. Moreover, it highlights the roles of school leaders who navigate the policy environment in Estonia and the international community in the policy process. The significance of the Estonians' resistance to the Soviet Union's policy directives are also discussed.

This article reviews hidden critiques of Stalinism published in the USSR from the late 1960s until the relaxation of censorship in the late 1980s. The main focus is on those Russian scholars who analysed particular phenomena in the Third World as a parallel process to highlight key problems in the USSR. The work of several of these “inside dissidents” who used Aesopian language to criticize Stalinism is explained in terms of the weakening of ideological control after 1956. Two scholars whose criticism is assessed are Viktor Sheinis and Marat Cheshkov, both of whom analysed key features of the Stalinist system during its mature or stagnant phase prior to its disintegration. The article highlights the continuing relevance of several points of their criticism, such as the need for social control over the state and the difficulty of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes some cases of the adoption of foreign theories of economic management in Soviet Estonia. During the Soviet years, a few Estonian economists were keen to learn capitalist theories and adapt them to socialist reality. Yet taking up foreign ideas was not easy, since they needed to be ideologically acceptable. In the 1960s and 1970s, foreign theories of economic management, administration and related matters became quite popular among Estonian economists. The article observes how foreign concepts and theories were adopted and interpreted. The actual impact of this on the everyday practice of enterprise management remains less clear. There is also no satisfactory answer to the more general question of whether this practice was of any assistance to the transformation of economic life in the 1980s and 1990s. As will be shown, Estonian management consulting emerged as a result of imported concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the shift in ideas that took place in Soviet economic thought between 1987 and 1991 and its relation to the changes in the real economy. The main focus of the article is on the issue of whether the evolution of Soviet economic thought in the analysed period changed in a gradual, path-dependent manner, or in a discontinuous, revolutionary fashion. Following the approach of Imre Lakatos, I argue that the conviction of being on the road to the ‘wholesome society’ formed the hard core of Soviet ideology, while ‘democratic centralism’ and the centralised economy provided its protective belt. Perestroika was the last attempt to save the hard core of Soviet ideology by adjusting the protective belt. This attempt failed, and the economic debates, which at first had been restricted to the protective belt, more and more approached its hard core, until it finally cracked. In this sense there was certainly a paradigm shift in Soviet economic thought. However, the notion of history as a purposeful process was not given up even by the Soviet adherents of monetarism. The utopian liberalism which became fashionable among Russian economists for a short period of time, it is argued, provides evidence that paradigm shifts and path-dependence in the evolution of economic ideas are not mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers two main arguments, both of which have important corollaries. First, the author argues that religion, and a specific form of religion, played a major role in the downfall of communism and the Soviet Union. A corollary is that religious motivations furnished important impetus to the development of democracy in former communist countries (FCC). Second, the author argues that courts, and more specifically constitutional courts in FCC, played a major role in promoting democracy in those nations. A corollary to that assertion is that constitution courts in most FCC have demonstrated considerable respect for and promotion of the role of religion in FCC. These assertions and their corollaries are discussed in light of scholarly studies on the place of religion in the modem constitutionalism movement in former colonial and communist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the role of the U.S. in the modern world system. According to historian William Appleman Williams, the country's role can be interpreted as a deliberate process of empire-construction. As stated, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed in the continental European hegemony and the U.S. emerged as a global unipolar country and since then it has maintained its dominance over the other nations. Under the national security strategy of September 2002, defense mobilization is designed to acquire indefinite military supremacy over any conceivable future rival or coalition of rivals.

The article focuses on Russia's political and economic condition after its transition from communism to democracy. Accordingly, Russia has been experiencing unusual features since its transformation from communism. Russia's transition to democracy is not similar to other countries who have been enjoying such political system. In addition, there are several arguments which have occurred in Russia's democratization. It is noted that Boris Yeltsin is considered as the progenitor of democracy in Russia. During Yeltsin's time, the dissolution of parliament is the start of postcommunist development.

This article focuses on the Soviet Union empire before and after perestroika. It is already evident that the Soviet Federation cannot be salvaged by pouring new wine into old bottles, that is, within the framework of the existing constitutional system and the dominant political and conceptual postulates on which it is based. At the same time, however, only the rudiments of new thinking have begun to be set forward in the plethora of party platforms, current reforms, new legislation and the programs of the nationalist and other newly emergent sociopolitical movements that are concerned with this sphere. This activities of our politicians and legislators, as a rule, have been reactive and they have failed to keep up with the tumultuous pace of events. Perhaps most disturbingly, the profound polarization and obsessive intransigence that characterize our thinking, our manner of speaking, and our argumentation in the field of nationality issues frequently preclude any kind of consent and communication not only between ordinary citizens, but among scholar-specialists as well. The fundamental core of the political culture of multi-ethnic states is typically that of the dominant ethnic group. Ethnic domination engenders social stratification and competition among individuals and groups within these societies, and produces tendencies both toward assimilation and toward the marginalization of subordinate groups.

Abstract: Health and health care in the Soviet Union are drawing special attention during these first years of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's reform of Soviet political and economic life. This report briefly describes the current state of Soviet health and medical care, Gorbachev's plans for reform, and the prospects for success. In recent years the Soviet Union has experienced a rising infant mortality rate and declining life expectancy. The health care system has been increasingly criticized for its uncaring providers, low quality of care, and unequal access. The proposed measures will increase by 50 percent the state's contribution to health care financing, encourage private medicine on a small scale, and begin experimentation with capitation financing. It seems unlikely that the government will be able to finance its share of planned health improvements, or that private medicine, constrained by the government's tight control, will contribute much in the near term. Recovery of the Soviet economy in general as well as the ability of health care institutions to gain access to Western materials will largely determine the success of reform of the Soviet health care system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has come to a point in its history which demands it form a coherent and comprehensive policy to address the odious threat of terrorism. The lack of such a coherent policy is one of the conditions that makes the United States a frequent target of terrorist attack. Developing such a policy is admittedly difficult, given the nature of terrorism and the difficulties it poses for the United States. State- sponsored terrorism has emerged as an effective and almost cost-free type of warfare for Iran, Libya, the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua. Narco-terrorism is a particularly heinous form of attack on the United States. In spite of all the difficulties, recognizing the links between terrorist-sponsoring states and understanding their objectives is the first step towards developing a policy. There are specific defensive and offensive strategies the Western democracies can employ to fight back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the Soviet foreign policy in the Latin America. One of the major elements of the new thinking introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev is the removal of the ideological character of Soviet foreign policy including an accomplished renunciation of the doctrine of Leonid Brezhnev. The author asserts that analysts in the United States provided little attention and understanding of the approach of the Soviet Union toward Latin America. He also discloses one of the notable guidelines for Soviet strategy stressing that efforts are highly needed through the United Nations and the Organization of American States in the case of the struggle between Latin American countries to arrive at a peaceful resolution of the issue.

The article explores the political economy of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, particularly the rise and fall of the corporate state. It is inferred that the Brezhnev era fusion was merged with a more complex economy, a more demanding society and the remainder of conflict left over from the Nikita Khrushchev period. Furthermore, it states that the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union under the Brezhnev era can be understood as a series of responses involved in instituting corporatist decision processes and enforcing policy priorities in maintaining a corporatist system.