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The article discusses the history of the organization ASN, originally called the Association for the Study of Nationalities: USSR and Eastern Europe. Topics include the group's affiliation with the organization American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the association of the journal "Nationalities Papers" with the City College of New York (CCNY), and the failure of the periodical "Journal of Soviet Nationalities." Also noted are the ASN's reaction to the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, and speeches in New York City by leaders of former Soviet Republics.

The period between March 1990 and June 1993 represents the critical window for European Union (EU)-Baltic relations. During this time Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania laid the foundation for future EU membership. For its part, the European community made a commitment to include the three republics in the process of enlargement. This paper traces the beginnings of EU-Baltic cooperation and examines factors that led to growing political and economic convergence. Nordic membership in the EU, ex-Soviet troop withdrawal, and Russian parliamentary elections were instrumental in bring-ing both sides together on the road to enlargement, but collective guilt provided the underlying rationale. In this paper, the author argues that it is impossible to understand fully this process of convergence without taking into account the connotations and consequences of the "black trinity": the Munich pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the Yalta agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal education reform has recently emerged as a key component in the rule of law promotion in the former Soviet Union republics,1 now sovereign and independent states collectively known, for the purpose of this paper, as the New Independent States (NIS). Scholarly articles and international forums2 suggest that legal education reform could be advanced by developing and implementing accreditation procedures for law schools, updating law school curricula, establishing transparent and rigorous grading standards, and retraining the law faculty. This paper discusses just one of these measures, namely the development and implementation of quality evaluation and accreditation procedures for law schools in the NIS region. In order to explore this issue in detail, the paper has been structured into six parts. Part I provides a brief overview of legal education in the Soviet Union, thus placing the issues tackled in this paper into a historical perspective. Part II describes the main changes occurring in the higher education system in general and legal education in particular in the NIS region after 1991, emphasising new challenges that privatisation of the higher education sector posed to the quality of legal education, thus triggering an urgent need for quality-assurance and accreditation mechanisms. The currently existent NIS practices of licensing, evaluation and accreditation of academic institutions, including law faculties within multi-disciplinary academic institutions, as well as separate law schools, are described in Part III. Parts IV and V adopt a comparative approach to accreditation by providing an overview of accreditation procedures in the United States, and the recent initiative and trends in quality evaluation and accreditation in Western Europe. Drawing upon the information provided in Parts I-V, Part VI offers concrete suggestions and recommendations for improving the implementation of accreditation procedures in the NIS region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the significant and resilient pre-communist, communist, and post-communist diversity of the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The empirical evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that both types of legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of post-communist transitions. Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform communist imprint in areas such as primary education and the importance of the state sector in the economy, in other areas of socioeconomic development, either communism was unable to reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect to GDP/capita or the size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental imprint has been fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as in the case of the massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist countries). In political terms, there is an interesting contrast between institutional trajectories (such as regime type), which largely follow pre-communist developmental differences, and individual political attitudes and behavior, where communist exceptionalism generally trumps post-communist diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sketches the roots and social underpinnings of both Economic Man (EM) and Soviet Man (SM) and looks at the interaction between the two archetypes during the transformation of former socialist nations since 1990. It depicts the creation of SM as the bearer of socialist "planned economy" ideology while also showing how EM was able to survive, albeit often underground, in the Soviet Union and its satellites. It also looks at the unique nature of the Soviet EM and to what extent SM has been dismantled. This paper concludes by examining how well the Western, market-oriented economic ideology was implemented and why the process occurred differently in various former socialist countries. It illustrates the varying malleability of the human mentality and provides some insights into the possible outcomes of future efforts at sociopolitical transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of Soviet era, pressed by the Popular Front forces of the Baltic republics, the first Congress of the USSR People's Deputies decided to set up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Commission. The Baltic representatives of the commission debated on how to make null and void the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was considered as one of the main causes of incorporation of the Baltic States in 1940. The heated dispute inevitably extended to the issue of reevaluating national history, as well as the redeclaring of sovereignty and territorial restoration. This paper largely explores the diversion of three nationalizing republics concerning the negation of the secret protocol and territorial restorationism: Lithuania, Ukraine, and Moldova. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because men have borne the heaviest burden of premature mortality in the former Soviet Union, women have for the most part been overlooked in studies of the health crisis in this part of the world. A considerable body of research points to alcohol consumption among males as a primary lifestyle cause of premature mortality. However, the extent to which alcohol use has penetrated the female population following the collapse of communism and how this consumption is associated with other social factors is less well-understood. Accordingly, this paper investigates alcohol consumption in eight republics of the former USSR – Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine using data collected in 2001. More specifically, discussion of gender role transformations and the historical experiences of women during the Soviet era emphasize two potentially important social influences examined in this analysis: psychological distress and Soviet political ideology. Findings suggest that distress is only weakly statistically associated with frequent drinking behavior among women, but results for political ideology show that this factor is statistically and significantly associated with drinking behaviors. Alcohol consumption was not particularly common among women under communism, but trends have been changing. Our discussion suggests that, after the collapse of the Soviet state, women are more able to embrace behavioral practices related to alcohol, and many may do so as an overt rejection of traditional Soviet norms and values. Findings are also discussed within the context of current epidemiological trends and future research directions in these eight republics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The modernisation of the economies of the former Soviet Union (FSU) will require substantial levels of foreign direct investment (FDI). The aim of this study is to examine factors which may be instrumental in determining this level of the FDI. It achieves this by establishing quantitative relationships between levels of FDI per capita to the year 2004 and three sets of indicators relating, respectively, to governance, economic freedom, and corruption perception. The paper demonstrates that the level of FDI in FSU states has been determined to a significant extent by the degree of reform from a planned economy towards a market economy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article makes use of documents from secret police archives to show that the Soviet secret police in Ukraine, the GPU (State Political Administration- Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie), together with the centre in Moscow, played a crucial role in the national operations of 1929-1934. These documents contradict the views of historians who argue that the regime's key power centres-Moscow and the secret police-were sincere in promoting Ukrainian culture and language. Instead, the archival materials indicate that a counter-Ukrainization was already being planned in the mid-1920s. The article argues that trials of "nationalists" were organized in order to prevent the crystallization of a political opposition in Ukraine at a time of crisis brought about by collectivization and famine. The repression of Ukrainians had a national component, was inspired by the centre, carefully organized by the secret police, and implemented through a steady flow of group criminal cases. Protocols from the interrogation rooms, testimonies by interrogators themselves, and scholarly literature on the topic are used to reconstruct the motivation of the GPU men who fabricated the criminal cases. The article demonstrates that all the cases were constructed according to a master narrative and presents a case for why torture was used: to legitimize the widespread use of terror in Ukraine, the regime required that the victims confess to being Ukrainian nationalists and members of anti-Soviet organizations whose goal was separatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses post Communist Russia, with a focus on the transition to democracy, and the framework of transit studies. Topics include the unexpected results of the transition out of Communism, the models of post Communist states in Latin America and Southern Europe as inadequate for describing the changes in Russia, the other countries of the Former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe; and the search for a framework outside of comparative politics to describe the transition in Russia, and the directions in which Russia is moving.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a body of scholarship arose which effectively bypassed Miroslav Hroch's work on the emergence of small nations. Rogers Brubaker, Yuri Slezkine and Ronald Suny, among others, persuasively argued that Soviet nationalities policies shaped the ethnogeographic make-up of the post-Soviet space some sixty or seventy years later: it had become literally almost unimaginable to conceive of national affiliation outside of institutionalized forms. This analysis also convincingly accounted for the relative weakness of ethnic Russian identity in contrast to the assertive nationalism of non-Russian nationalities around the time of the USSR's collapse. The Kuban' Cossacks - an ethnocultural community in the south of Russia - never had official recognition as a Soviet nationality. Hroch's framework can be applied to show their clearly national characteristics and, indeed, their progress towards nationhood around the turn of the twentieth century. By reclaiming Hroch's framework for the post-Soviet context, and combining it with later scholarship, we are able to identify this process for the first time, and thus further refine our understanding of the nation-formation processes within Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between Kazakhstan and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), examining questions of an ethnically distinct region's acceptance or rejection of "alien rule" over national independence. The Kazakhs would seem to have an extraordinarily strong cause to separate itself from a Russian-dominated union, the author states. Also discussed are ethnic groups who want to stay in a union state dominated by another group.

Focuses on the creation of the Soviet Ukrainian anthem in February 1944. Reflection of various aspects of Ukraine as a republic state in three stanzas of the anthem; Competition among prominent poets for deciding the text of the anthem; Representation of national symbols in the anthem; Decision of the government of Soviet Union to amend Soviet constitution that would enable the union republics to establish their own armies and maintain diplomatic relations with foreign states, in February 1944.