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The news media have given saturation coverage in the past six months to two developments in the USSR: the detente with the West and the activities (both in the USSR and abroad) of the Soviet (The word Soviet is used simply in reference to the country without any implication as to the nature of the regime. Russia cannot be employed as it does not embrace the non-Russian nationalities) liberal dissidents. As this article tries to, show, the two events are not unrelated. It is important to understand the background to both as well as the significance of the emergence of a largely right-wing intelligentsia. The latter can best be understood in terms of the repression of the left together with the evolution of an ideology which fits their own socio-economic position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stalin years have become a reference point of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika, or restructuring, today. The genuine inquiry into the years of Stalin's terror, the rehabilitations of the victims of the Moscow Purge Trials, and the tentative openings into the debates of the twenties have raised the question of the nature of the system Stalin established. Long-term contradictions in Soviet society were created by Stalin's method of rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of an anti-socialist hegemony has been widely accepted as the pivot of the Conservative Party's electoral dominance in the interwar period. Anti-communism as a component of anti-socialist discourse, though commonly alluded to, has not received systematic attention, and is known above all for its appearance during the 1924 election campaign by way of the Zinoviev letter. This article offers the first comprehensive account of British political anti-communism in the early 1920s and reinterprets its significance and reach by demonstrating the vast extent to which it saturated Conservative propaganda between 1919 and 1924, as well as the range of social groups it sought to appeal to by these methods. It explores the origins and development of political anti-communism from the 'first red scare' in 1919-21 to the infamous 1924 campaign, punctuated by a series of 'little red scares' by which the fear of communism was perpetuated among key demographics. The 1924 election, rather than being seen chiefly as a triumph of 'progressive' Baldwinite Conservatism, must be understood in this context of a developed and pervasive anti-communist discourse that could be effectively deployed to engender a red scare under certain conditions, which the first Labour government was not the first to provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estonia has since the liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991 successfully branded itself as a digital society and an education nation. This transformation builds on a sociotechnical imaginary where the progression of learning and the advancement of future citizens is postulated by a restructuring of the classroom through digital solutions. In this case study, we look at a prototype of a future classroom that was set up at the Estonian pavilion at the world fair EXPO 2020 in Dubai, as part of a nation branding process, promoting the nation's educational system and prosperous ed-tech sector. The future classroom was promoted using slogans and futuristic visuals that targeted foreign investors and policy makers, in a way that suggested that the anticipated digital future already exists in Estonia, and therefore, is available for foreign investment, while at the same time connecting to a national and historical narrative of Estonia as part of the European cultural sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three hundred university students filled out a scale to measure attitudes toward Russia. The pro-Russian 25 per cent of this group was compared with the anti-Russian 25 per cent on several issues. (a) Majorities in both groups agreed on six true-or-false propositions (suggesting the American stereotype about Russia"), hut disagreed on other equally crucial statements. However, even where disagreement on these belief statements was registered, it seemed probable that the values implicit in the items were not being seriously debated. (b) The anti-Russians, more emphatically than tile pro- Russians, opposed the U. S. S. R. extending its holdings or influence in Europe after the war. (c) The pro-Russians appeared to be somewhat more 'progressive" on domestic (U. S.) issues than the anti-Russians; certain other statistical evidence points to a positive but perhaps not high correlation between these two variables. (d) The pro-Russians have read more hooks about Russia than the anti-Russians, but both groups have had access to predominantly favorable reading material. Papers from several groups of respondents were sorted so as to reveal group differences. Largely negative findings along lines of "section of the country and voting preference suggest that the pro-Russian trend has moved fairly uniformly across party and regional lines. On the other hand, religious-cultural differences do show up. Catholics, as a group, earned the lowest scale scores, and Jews from Cornell and from a group of adults earned the highest scale scores. These results were interpreted in terms of a greater general conservatism on the part of Catholics, plus specific anti-communistic training, and a greater general liberalism on the part of the Jews, plus specific tolerance for Russia because of its reported emphasis on minority group equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Russian Jewish cultural continuity in the Diaspora. It is stated that transmission of cultural values between generations of Russia and East European Jews in the Diaspora is being examined through the presented papers. Some of the featured are Zsuzsa Hetényi, Alice Nakhimovsky and Christina Parnell who used various approaches in their presentation of the mentioned culture matter, thus, the author focused on the Russian Jewish philosophical writer Lev Shestov who had an exceptional orientation of the Russian culture despite of his Judaic-Hellenistic baggage.

In this paper, the concept of internal colonization is applied to the Soviet initiatives of re-socializing the large parts of the population and creating a socialist working class from peasantry, artisans, and residues of the bourgeoisie. The internal colonization, or the power relations between native Communists and their subalterns in Lithuania, is analyzed on the basis ofRoses Are Red, a novel by Bieliauskas. Here, class is invented as substitute of race. The Soviet socialists stand for hegemonic standards of “normalcy,” whereas bourgeoisie is portrayed as subject of difference, as internal Orient and as internal colony, and the relationship between the two can be legitimately defined as internal colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scholarly consensus on why NATO adopted a ‘non-policy’ towards the non-North Atlantic world rests on the logic of the Cold War. But British diplomats and officials did not see NATO’s policy towards Africa through a Cold War lens. NATO’s ‘non-policy’ towards the world beyond the North Atlantic was not the product of an allied Cold War consensus among the allies. Instead, it was the result of a determined British effort to channel growing pressure for NATO action into a bureaucratic dead-end in an effort to keep the Cold War out of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the violence in the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997). The actions of both sides mimicked ethnic cleansing as civilian settlements were targeted. The fragmented ethno-regional identities of the republic had historically lived together peacefully, so this style of violence was unanticipated. However, its patterns resemble similar events in the past 40 years that have been examined by other scholars. By conceptualizing it as a modern phenomenon that can be compared to, I develop a better understanding of this form of violence in the Tajik Civil War and place it within scholarly work on ethnic cleansing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why did British writers, when they wrote about the Soviet Union, often deploy the imagery of numbers, arithmetic and mathematics? This paper scrutinises a number of such instances, including Orwell's famous use of the equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’ inNineteen Eighty-Fourand Koestler's fascination with Euclid's proof of the infinitude of prime numbers inThe Invisible Writing. These are put into relation with less celebrated works where questions of number or of mathematical reasoning are politicised by being applied to the Soviet Union. The paper situates these literary representations in relation to three key debates that intersected in interesting ways. Firstly, a debate about utilitarianism's attempt to quantify social goods and the Romantic rejection of that attempt; secondly, a debate about the philosophical foundations of mathematics (which involved Russell, Wittgenstein and Heidegger); and finally, a debate about the relation between mathematics and dialectical materialism, which involved key British and Soviet scientists and mathematicians and reflected on the position of science under Communism. Taking my cue from recent calls by Alain Badiou and Steven Connor for a rapprochement between the humanities and mathematics, I argue that this was a period in which numbers and arithmetic were profoundly politicised in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, public spaces in Moscow and in other post-socialist cities underwent dramatic changes in line with the wider adaptation to the market economy, epitomized in processes of privatization and commercialization. Most recently, however, these processes have been overshadowed by a "second generation" of post-socialist change that entails the recasting of the very conception of the public and public space. In this paper, we analyze these transformations in Moscow through a case study of the reconstruction of Gorky Park. The case study builds upon extensive empirical material collected through qualitative interviews, document and media studies, and on-site observations. It is shown that despite appealing to ideas of openness, livability and the public good, the park reconstruction in fact entails the production of socially divisive urban space that prioritizes consumerism at the cost of less-scripted and diverse public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s produced literature that became a part of the counterculture of Soviet dissent. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified, to a significant degree, as people of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). The battle for the return to Israel and the new Jewish renaissance in the intellectual sphere of the unofficial led to the emergence of new topographical concepts, which were inspired primarily by the Jewish cultural tradition. In fact, the exodus texts written in the 1960s–1980s represented a new, late Soviet shaping of Zionist prose. They relate to the symbol of the Promised Land as a fundamental projection of aspirations. Late Soviet Zionist texts share the traditional Jewish vision of Israel as an imagined topos of the original homeland that is both retrospective (with reference to the biblical promise of the land and the seizure of Canaan) and prospective (return and redemption). The Exodus story contained in Sefer Shemot becomes a leading poetic, philosophical and at times religiously charged metaphor of liberation and reunification. The re-strengthened collective memory of tradition required biblical symbols to be imbued with new semiotic power. This paper will show that the historical dimension of the events dealt with in the literature often has strong mystical and mythological traits and displays messianic-apocalyptic hopes of salvation. However, alternative literary space and time models represented in the aliyah literature hereby betray their rootedness in the teleology of the communist regime. The powerful Israel utopia reflects both the eschatological time of the Soviet empire and its phantasms of paradise on earth. Late Soviet Zionism and totalitarian discourse are shown to be two space-time utopias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Available evidence suggests that young former Soviet Union immigrants in New York City have high rates of non-medical prescription opioid and heroin use, drug injection and injection-related risk behavior, making them vulnerable to hepatitis C virus (HCV)/human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, overdose and associated harms. This group has been the focus of little research, however. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data from 80 former Soviet immigrants (ages 18-29) to characterize their opioid use trajectories, injection risk behavior, HCV/HIV testing histories and self-reported HCV/HIV serostatus, and provides clinically meaningful data to inform tailored education, prevention and harm reduction interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research on history teaching has begun to focus on political motivation. This paper is the result of the author’s dissertation, which investigates Latvian history teaching under the authoritarian regimes of Ulmanis and Stalin. It reveals the effects of authoritarianism on goals, curriculum, teaching materials and methods, and the teacher’s position in the classroom. The research undertaken attempts to discern how authoritarian political rule manipulates the teaching of national history to further its political goals, and the resulting effects. The article focuses on the teaching of Latvian history under the Soviet authoritarian regime in Latvia (1934–1940, 1940–1941/1944–1991), but includes discussion of the Nazi occupation and periods of democracy in Latvian history as a source of comparison in order to analyse the teaching of Latvian history in democratic and authoritarian societies and define the traits characteristic to authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian traits are revealed through comparisons of the purpose of history teaching as determined by the ruling order, the goal of history teaching, curriculum, methodology and materials, and teacher status under authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. Results indicate that goals of history teaching become contrived under authoritarianism – politicised curriculum marginalises some groups, textbook authorship and choice is limited, and teachers become transmitters of the regime’s agenda resulting in marginalisation. This study deduces that two cultures of history teaching emerge – official history in school and unofficial history acquisition that helps maintain a sense of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from fieldwork conducted in late 2009, this paper examines the Russian educational sphere and initiatives by the political elite to control and manipulate textbook content, testing objectives, and the structuring of curricula in order to maximize exposure to, and absorption of, its preferred narratives. Using a more detailed critical analysis of textbook content, I show that methods of discursive manipulation are used to highlight positive aspects of the Stalinist period - especially victory in World War II - while downplaying its political repression. This manipulation allows the state to both legitimize its version of Stalinist history and to perpetuate the underlying legitimizing function that version serves. In this way, the discourse implicitly justifies Putin's centralized state as the type of system that has historically produced great achievements for Russia. This article adds to the literature on the manipulation of educational content for political purposes generally, and in the case of Russia specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates life strategies of physical worker Russian men, belonging to the generation of people who were the most active group in the late Soviet period, went through the collapse of USSR and the transformation to capitalism. The historical biographic perspective allows reproducing common social experiences which have formed this generation. The in-depth biographical interviews were conducted with six men of age 46–63, single, with officially low income, who started their working lives in the public sector. The research shows the diversity of men’s alternative life strategies to adjust to the neoliberal economy established after the collapse of the USSR. The paper explores the biographies as representations of diverse forms of masculinities formed along gender, age, social position and marital status-based marginalization processes emerging in the transition context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the current state of the life sciences in the Russian Federation, which has potential health-security and biosecurity implications. Research involving advanced biotechnologies present opportunities for public-health advancement, but their dual-use capabilities raise biosecurity concerns that carry global economic and security implications. While experts have raised such concerns about possible Russian misuse of biotechnologies, Russia is not a top-tier nation for life sciences research, by many metrics. A better understanding of the current landscape of biotechnology and life-science research and investment in the Russian Federation will help to identify potential areas of concern and opportunities for international scientific engagement. This work builds on the substantial legacy of Raymond A. Zilinskas in his work to describe and analyze biodefense and biosecurity concerns in the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of Operation Rubicon provides a 'missing link' in the history signals intelligence. It connects the period of the Second World War, dominated by Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall, with the Snowden era. This special section examines signals intelligence in the latter decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the processes of covert interference that were used help us to understand sources and methods in our present times. It examines new material that has emerged in Europe that expands our comprehension of the intelligence co-operation between the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden, focusing on the control of technology corporations, especially Crypto AG. It argues that, as a result of Operation Rubicon, all states with high-grade computing, even the Soviet Union, were probably secret beneficiaries of this process and derived substantial flow of intelligence as a result, mostly from the global south. However, the task of exploring the material generated by Operation Rubicon has only just begun, since most of the product remains classified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of the former Soviet Union's borders, cross border interactions between the former Soviet Union states and China have augmented, and particularly the impetus given by the Chinese authorities to the Belt and Road Initiative has increased the presence of various Chinese actors in the countries along China's western border. Notably, China's 'going global' has received increasingly scholarly attention in the past few years. Hitherto comparative analyses or in-depth case studies on Chinese presence in the states along China's western border are yet sparse. By focusing on specific actors and on the ground interactions, this special issue, which includes case studies of the interactions between Chinese and Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik actors, aims to show a) the diversity in scope, actors and modalities of involvement, and b) the sometimes ambiguous goals and interests within China's going out strategy in the region. At the same time, it aims to present a more close-up study of the responses of the population in the host states. Through a focus on encounters on the ground, imaginaries, and perceptions, we aim to get deeper insights in the character and consequences of China's involvement in the post-Soviet border region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 research examined the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war on identity changes among educated Ukraine-born women who have lived their adult lives in Israel. The data, collected in July 2022, were determined to be representative of educated women aged 25–60 who emigrated from Ukraine during 1988–2018. Findings revealed a strengthened Ukrainian identity in over half of the respondents. The Ukrainian-born Israelis, who held a hybrid Russian-Israeli identity, strengthened their Ukrainian identity. However, this strengthening was not uniform. It was associated with (a) frequency of exposure to Ukrainian news and social media that support the Ukrainian government; (b) attitudes toward the Russian-Ukrainian war; (c) the presence of the war in daily life; and (d) the geo-political place of origin in Ukraine. The study underscores the importance of researching identity shifts in people indirectly affected by crises in today's information-rich age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the features of the Soviet higher education system that have been crucial to the formation of the current system and then focus on the main changes that it has endured in the past 20 years. We pay special attention to the current challenges in the sphere of higher education and the counter-measures taken by the government and the academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of calculating the Soviet losses in the Second World War has confronted scholars with potentially insoluble difficulties. Especially in the first year of the war, during the catastrophic defeats and disorganized retreats, individual records on Soviet military personnel were either simply not kept or were lost or destroyed. Even during the war, the Soviet government criticized the failure to keep casualty lists up to date and noted that often soldiers were killed or went missing even before they were formally added to the unit rosters. The Red Army had no equivalent to the dog tag. Many soldiers, out of superstition, refused to wear the smertniki—little wooden cases that held identification information on slips of paper—believing that a wearer was ordained to die. Official estimates to this date, however, appear plainly understated. The author proposes a new method for estimating the Soviet personnel losses in the Second World War, based on the 1939 and 1956 censuses of the Soviet population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet wartime propaganda and contemporary Russian work on the activities of the Orthodox Church during the war promote the Church's claim that it was motivated by patriotism, a point it used to claim legitimacy in the USSR and now in contemporary Russia. In contrast, this paper argues that the hierarchs and laity of the Patriarchal Church were not essentially motivated by patriotism or the desire to show loyalty to the Soviet regime in 1941, but instead acted to use the war to achieve three goals: first and most important, to become relevant in the everyday life of the Soviet people by promoting Christian beliefs and values; second, to earn legitimacy in the eyes of anti-clerics and non-believers by lending moral and practical support to the war effort; and finally, to obtain legal standing by showing its trustworthiness and loyalty through displays of Russian (not Soviet) patriotism consonant with its historic role, all the while without endorsing communist ideology. The hierarchs orchestrated a campaign from the top down throughout the clerical hierarchy, to achieve the aforementioned goals whilst from below the faithful, independently of the hierarchs, used their local displays of patriotism as leverage to reopen local churches and to force the regime to respect their right to worship. The grassroots response by believers and parish clerics in support of the Church and its wartime activities represents primarily an endorsement of the Church, Christianity, Russian patriotism, and only secondarily, if at all, loyalty to the Stalinist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine the evolution of national communism in Ukraine in the twentieth century. In this paper, national communism in Ukraine is discussed as the only possible legal opposition to the Soviet authority that arose from the contradiction between the interests of the centralized state (in the Soviet Union as a whole) and claims for national self-determination either in cultural, economic or political dimensions (in the union republics). It is argued that national communist opposition was latently presented during all 70 years of Soviet rule; however, certain periods, when national communism succeeded in entering the political scene with clear demands against an anti-national Soviet policy, are distinguished. Each period is discussed with reference to the political situation in the USSR which enabled the activization of the national movement in Ukraine and its further penetration into the local party apparatus. Conclusions on the vitality of national communist ideas in contemporary Ukrainian society are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1981, Hoover Institution Press published a collection of testimonies of Polish citizens and their children deported to the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941.War Through Children’s Eyescontained English translations of compositions, interviews, and testimonies from the Polish Government Collection at the Hoover Institution Archives. In the 1980s efforts were underway in Poland to collect similar personal stories of survivors of Soviet deportations, including children’s testimonies. The result was the creation of theArchiwum Wschodnie[Eastern Archive] and the KARTA Center in Warsaw. The archive, legalized after the fall of Communism in 1990, is a major primary source collection dealing with the history of former Polish eastern territories. The paper discusses parts of theArchiwum Wschodniecollection focusing on the testimonies of children deported to the Soviet Union. The trauma of war and displacement is examined through personal stories and testimonies of deportees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extrapolatesfuturepaths of genuine savings (GS) by using our integrated assessment model. The results with the base case (BC) indicate that both GSwithoutpopulation change (GS) and GSwithpopulation change (GSn) are almost positive in OECD countries in the twenty-first century (satisfying the necessary but insufficient condition for sustainability); those numbers are projected to be negative in 2100. Asia (ASIA), the Middle East and Africa (MEAF), the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (FSEE), and the world show upward trends for both values, showing negative signs in 2010 and positive signs after 2050 (in ASIA, MEAF, and the world) and in 2100 (in FSEE). The values in Latin America (LAMR) remain negative throughout. We examine additional following three cases: demand reduction (DR), carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction (CR), and population reduction (PR). The GSn results compared to the BC indicate that (1) GSn in DR is similar to that of BC, (2) GSn in PR is slightly higher than that of BC, and (3) GSn in CR is unexpectedly lower than that of BC. This GSn reduction in the CR case derives from the fact that the term for calculating resource depletion (especially resource rent, which equals the difference between price and cost) in GS and GSn increased, leading to a greater term being subtracted from gross savings. The resource price increases with the marginal price of natural gas, given the energy-source shift in reducing CO2emissions, from cheap coal to expensive natural gas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with the role of patronage networks, which served as safety nets in the period of revolution. These informal hierarchical associations were eventually incorporated into the new networks that appeared in the process of the establishment of post-revolutionary institutions, and became integrated into the new Soviet hierarchies, thus mitigating the social rupture caused by the upheaval of 1917. Documentary sources reveal that personal relations of various kinds extended across 1917, providing relief and support in the course of the revolutionary turmoil and playing an extremely important role for those who identified themselves with the old regime. As a result of the revolution they became byvshie; for them to live through the revolution meant to survive, physically and mentally, while trying to sustain an old identity and to develop – or accept – new ones. A recent sociological study has determined a number of patterns of response to the revolution among the old elite: protest and emigration; migration inside the country; allegiance to the new authorities in the hope of an improvement in the situation; and, finally, apathy. The article argues that personal networks, including patronage connections that stemmed from professional and occupational ties, played a significant role in choosing a particular path of behaviour. The article focuses on one distinctive case-study, namely the relationships among three historians: Sergei Fedorovich Platonov, Nikolai Dmitrievich Chechulin and Sergei Dmitrievich Sheremetev. The relations among them are examined here as an example of the flexible patronage relationships that functioned successfully in the estate-based, but intensively modernising social order of Imperial Russia, became vital during the revolutionary period and were effectively incorporated into early Soviet Russia's social fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Any meaningful attempt to understand how the Soviet system evolved and ‘worked’ must take into account not only those who conformed ideologically, but also those who actively embraced alternative frameworks of meaning. This paper centres on the experience of a young factory worker, Petr Terekhovich, who, in the mid-1920s, abandoned ‘godlessness’ to devote himself to the charismatic lay preacher, Brother Ioann Churikov, and to a highly ascetic, scripture-based form of sobriety. Drawing largely on archival materials, it seeks to understand Terekhovich's story as a case study of religious struggle, belief and activism, an account of persecution by atheist officials, and ultimately, a narrative of resistance, spiritual freedom and self-determination under Soviet rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will study one of the unique population movements in modern history: the circular movement of students and trainees between China and the Soviet Union from 1950 to 1966. This population movement includes more than 38,000 Chinese who were trained by the leading Soviet Union industrial enterprises, research centers and institutions of higher learning. These returned students and trainees from the Soviet Union captured a considerable number of prominent positions in the Chinese leadership from the 1980s to the 1990s. The explanation of their political impact relies on the domestic country's politics and international context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines newspaper narratives depicting model youth in Komsomol'skaya Pravda in the early 1960s in order to cast light on the Party-state's efforts in the Khrushchev years to use the press as a means of re-energising the drive to forge model communist citizens. In contrast to most studies of Soviet media, this study offers a glimpse of the reception of official signals, by drawing on sociological studies that Komsomol'skaya Pravda conducted of its readers in the early 1960s. Throughout, the paper explores recent scholarly discussions of resistance, conformism and agency in the Soviet context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal schooling was virtually non-existent before the Soviet power in nomadic Kyrgyzstan, as communal life and learning was organized informally at the household and clan level. During the Soviet period, however, educational success became an avenue to a new form of upward social and geographical mobility, and the school provided new and prestigious positions for local teachers and administrators. This paper explores how the externally imposed Soviet collectivization policies reshaped the understandings and meanings of place and community during the twentieth century, a reshaping that centrally involved redefining education and the importance of 'the school'. In the post-Soviet period, the utility of secondary and higher education in local and national labour markets has diminished, as has the power and prestige of educators. Yet the appeal of education lingers on. The authors seek to document these claims using oral histories, ethnographic interviews and participant observations in the Ylay Talaa Valley of the Kyrgyz Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of the Jewish ethnic economy in the Moldovan town of Belz across a number of historical periods, with particular emphasis on the Soviet era. Economic practices are seen as embedded in a larger context of ongoing social relations at various levels, both within the Jewish community of the town and across ethnic borders. The author argues that the ethnic economy under socialism may be conceived as a non-market response to the ideologically imposed prohibition of private entrepreneurship, and focuses on the Jewish involvement in the second/ shadow socialist economy. Within this approach, economic ideas and practices emerge as markers of Soviet collective Jewish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines performances of hospitality in everyday life to explore the lived experience of “being Moldovan”. National identity in Moldova can only be understood by reference to the peculiarities of history—to the presence of a neighbouring kin-state (Romania), a multiethnic population, Soviet ideology, and successive efforts at nation-building. The instabilities, contradictions, and ambiguities of national identity are also experienced and interpreted, as they are regularly performed in informal and formal settings. The “hospitality” of Moldovans—performed daily through linguistic code-switching, in practices of buying and selling, in life-cycle celebrations such as weddings, and in the official greeting and welcoming of dignitaries and visiting delegations by folk-costumed performers—is, paradoxically, an important site of this experience of ambiguity. The same set of practices both renders its performers “masters of their own houses”, while at the same time revealing the limits of the metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the performance of three national holidays in Transnistria in the context of the ongoing consolidation of Transnistrian society since 1991. Transnistrian leaders play a key role in the construction of a distinct Transnistrian regional identity; hence this paper pays close attention to the speeches of Transnistrian leaders as reported in the mass media. In addition, I also base my conclusions on interviews with the residents of Rybnita. I was able to observe and describe the official commemorations of the anniversary of the October Revolution, May Day and Victory Day, all key Soviet holidays which are still celebrated in Transnistria, mostly by the older generation and members of the Communist Party. The theoretical framework of the article, therefore, relies on a constructivist approach to the nation-building process through the manipulation of public opinion by elites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of the forceful dispute over national identity in Moldova, the Communist government of 2001–2009 aimed to articulate a project of “Moldovan identity” which was raised to the level of a state ideology. In the spirit of Soviet propaganda, this project was implemented through public holidays and celebrations. The following analysis examines two case studies—the Wine Festival and the Independence Cup—by discerning the performative practices designed as part of the nation-building project in Moldova between 2005 and 2009. Organized at the official level, but with the strong assistance of mass media, these public events were intended to win the support and attention of Moldovan society by employing rituals and performances similar to those of the Soviet period. The paper addresses the characteristics and mechanisms of these performative practices, and considers why this nation-building project did not achieve its goals, but instead caused tension and disputes. One of the main aims is to understand how the Communist government sought to redefine “the Moldovan nation”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

She further considers the extent to which, as parent states, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia can exercise foreign policy agency I vis-à-vis i their more powerful neighbours Russia and Turkey. Extreme periphery states, such as Abkhazia, created unofficial and informal economic institutions and cross-border ties on the Abkhazian-Georgian line of contact and the border with Russia. I De facto i states constitute an interconnected phenomena in the history of state-creation and state-building. [Extracted from the article]

Presents a letter to the editor concerning an article about the Soviet Union's countermeasures to the Star Wars ballistic missile defense system of the U.S.

The article presents the comments of the author on various political analysts' papers on a comprehensive nuclear test ban by the U.S. administration. Jack Anderson reported that the U.S. President Ronald Reagan had decided that he did not want to resume talks with the government of Soviet Union on the issue. Warren Heckrotte concludes that the distribution of seismically measured yields of Soviet nuclear weapons tests is not inconsistent with their limit.

Whereas relatively much has been written about the Russian/Soviet economists repressed and killed or forced into emigration under Stalin, the story of those who were psychologically broken but could continue their work still has to be written. Based on published as well as archive materials, this paper aims at giving insights into the fate of a neglected Russian historian of economic thought who certainly can be regarded as one of the ‘silent’ victims of Stalinism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the ‘universalistic’ turn of Cossack particularism in early twentieth century Kuban' from soslovie to ethnos. It investigates the growing tension between the particularism of the Cossack caste and the increasingly universalistic setting of modern Russia, a setting that reduced the Kuban' Cossackdom to an isolated anachronism. In the early twentieth century the Cossacks' attempt to escape the outmoded soslovie identity and their search for a ‘modern’ alternative resulted in the ethno-centric self-fashioning of Kuban' Cossackdom, a move which would lead to the emergence of a Cossack nation-building movement in the Kuban' region during the Russian civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A classical result due to Frank and Wolfe [An algorithm for quadratic programming. Naval Res Log Quart. 1956;3:95-110] says that a quadratic function f attains its supremum on a nonempty polyhedron M if f is bounded from above on M. In this note, we present a stringent proof of the extension of this result to cubic optimization (known from Andronov, Belousov and Shironin [On solvability of the problem of polynomial programming (In Russian). Izvestija Akadem. Nauk SSSR, Tekhnicheskaja Kibernetika. 1982;4:194-197. Translation appeared in News of the Academy of Science of USSR, Dept. of Technical Sciences, Technical Cybernetics.]). Further, we discuss related results. In particular, we bring back to attention Kummer's [Globale Stabilität quadratischer Optimierungsprobleme. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin, Math-Nat R. 1977;XXVI(5):565-569] generalization of the Frank-Wolfe theorem to the case that f is quadratic, but M is the Minkowski sum of a compact set and a polyhedral cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses early Soviet efforts to secure ‘under lock and key’ its over-5000-km-long Central Asian border with Iran, Afghanistan and Xinjiang. The state sought to build relations of trust and friendship between border dwellers and guards – the pogranichnye voiska – to increase security and to demonstrate the emancipatory nature of the Soviet Union. However, these goals were compromised by the region's geographic extremity, basmachi raids and existing flows of people, goods and flocks across the state border. As a result, the early state pursued a contradictory set of policies in order to discourage indiscriminate crossings and to project an image of friendship – however limited in practice – across the border. Secret police circulars and reports from the Communist Party's Central Asian bureau testify to the difficulty and contradictions of crafting friendship on the border in the Soviet Union's first two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past two decades, NATO's membership and mission have expanded. Practitioners and scholars have extensively debated the pros and cons of the changes, but few have sought to explain why the alliance is so resilient. This paper directly asks and answers the question: Why has NATO mission and membership expanded since the end of the Cold War? Three leading approaches of international relations are used to answer this question. The empirical analysis finds that in isolation, none of the theories perform well at predicting or explaining NATO's adaptation to the post-Cold War environment. However, when combined, they do offer a coherent explanation for the alliance's enlargement and the development of out-of-area operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the popular response to Soviet myths in the post-Soviet period through the lens of the complicated treatment of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. As arguably the most famous Soviet World War II martyr, Kosmodem'ianskaia's image splintered after glasnost' and has been located at the nexus of debate in various media since 1991. This paper poses questions about the fracturing of national memory when a nation has undergone upheaval: about the stability of heroes, about citizens' responses to them, and about heroes' transformation in the new regime. Catriona Kelly has demonstrated that the treatment of a national hero can illuminate the circumstances that produced the hero and the cultural climate of subsequent decades. Building on her work, this article asks "Why and how has the image of Kosmodem'ianskaia remained relevant while other Soviet heroes have been neglected since 1991?" This article posits that Kosmodem'ianskaia's continued significance lies above all in the flexibility of her image and the transitional aspects of her body. Her depictions in various contexts represent prominent responses to the authoritarian regime which gave birth to both Kosmodem'ianskaia and her legacy. The variety of her images demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure two decades after the collapse of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet press and media system were part of the state institutions. In the mid-1990s, a significant degree of journalistic freedom that had developed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was followed by a pronounced democratic setback, which was a result of the general political development in Russia. Despite this, the findings based on qualitative text analysis of articles in the daily press strongly indicate that, from the dissolution of the Soviet state, readers of the press are being increasingly addressed and positioned as active and knowledgeable citizens. The method for text examination is analysis of semantic roles exploring how agency is represented in the sample text material, which covers the democratically critical time span 1978-2003. The findings imply that, although post-Soviet journalism itself faces considerable difficulties, a firm cultural ground for citizen participation in society has been laid through changes in press language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the development of a Soviet thermonuclear weapons program. Tube and the sloika lines of research; Idea of employing an atomic explosion for imploding thermonuclear fuel; Development and test of a two-stage thermonuclear charge.

Speculates on the driving momentum for KGB officials to reveal the history of nuclear espionage to `restore' their rightful place in history as the true `heroes of the Soviet nuclear miracle.' KGB's efforts to steal American secrets; Theory that there was no Russian bomb, only an American one, masterfully discovered by Soviet spies; Prestige of physicists versus that of KGB agents; Andrei Sakharov's skepticism about the importance of espionage; The hydrogen bomb; Details.

This article offers an account of being a Soviet journalist before and during glasnost. Soviet reporters' weapons are still the pen and the notebook--the cost of a personal computer is about the same as a reporter's lifetime salary. It was not a big deal to me when Mikhail Gorbachev, the godfather of glasnost, recently asked the Congress of People's Deputies for a moratorium on the new press law which the same Congress had accepted only half a year ago. If you read ten different newspapers of the Brezhnev era, you would have found no difference: they all had the same mother. Pravda sometimes publishes articles that absolutely contradict Gorbachev's speeches, although Gorbachev is still the general secretary of the party that he has almost dismantled. Three years ago the same Ogonyok, with Vitali Korotich as the editor, published the truth about Adilov--that he took bribes and shared money with the first party secretary of Uzbekistan, that he had personally killed more than ten people (it is not possible to know the exact number--too much time has passed).

Explores the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform on social science research in the Soviet Union. Details an explosion of interest in five major areas: ethnic relations, public opinion research, problems of change in Soviet politics, thought and rhetoric national leaders, and environmentalism and environmental management. INSET: The roots of change, by A.H. Kassof..