A Spiritual Perestroika: Religion in the Late Soviet Parliaments, 1989–1991

Perestroika in the Soviet Union's health system.

Recent experiments in the Soviet Union mirror the debates in the United Kingdom about improving incentives in health care. The most interesting innovation to emerge under perestroika is a pilot project in Leningrad and at two other sites which could radically change the financing of hospitals. Hitherto, the budget has gone from the ministry to the hospitals and to the polyclinics by bureaucrati...

The Hazards of Half-measures: Perestroika and the Failure of Post-Soviet Democratization

Perestroika was the most dramatic chapter in the political history of the world in the late twentieth century. Yet, it did not fulfill what was arguably its loftiest promise—to lay firm foundations for lasting popular rule in Russia. The failure of democratization in post-Soviet Russia may be traced in part to two fateful shortcomings in perestroika: the tepidity of Gorbachev’s economic reforms...

Spiritual Tourism: Religion and Spirituality in Contemporary Travel

Soviet Secular Ritual: Atheist Propaganda or Spiritual Consumerism?

Planning the Soviet Defense Industry: the Late 1920s and 1930s*

The paper describes the procedures for planning the Soviet defense industry in the interwar period and analyses its limitations. Three features differentiated the planning of the defense industry from that of the civilian economy. First, the supply of national defense in the broadest sense had high priority and received the close attention of the country’s top leadership. Second, the process of...