It has been observed in the past that, at the time of Mikhail Gorbachëv‟s ascension to power following the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, few people believed that the Soviet Union was heading for collapse; merely reform (Bartlett, R. (2005:278)). Thus the question begs; what changed over the next five years to bring one of the world‟s two superpowers to the point of utte...

Knowledge producers conducting research on a particular set of questions may respond to supply and demand shocks by shifting resources to a different set of questions. Cognitive mobility measures the transition from one location to another in idea space. We examine the cognitive mobility flows unleashed by the influx of Soviet mathematicians into the United States after the collapse of the Sovi...

This paper tries to test the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in Former Soviet Union countries after their independence in 1991. It has become an article of faith in most economic and political circles that opening up the economy to international trade will produce substantial benefits in terms of greater consumer choice and higher living standards. Higher productivity is...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the memory of World War II has been used in state-led nation-building processes of post-Soviet countries to foster a sense of national belonging. This paper provides an insight into the offi cial discourse of World War II in Russia and Ukraine by concentrating on a comparative analysis of World War II representations in Russian and Ukrainian school histor...

(Far Eastern National University, Vladivostok, Russia) CASE Visiting Fellow, UC Berkeley November 2008 Civil-Military Relations in Russia. Field Report Civil-military relations Civil-military relations are a very important issue for the modern Russian politics. Russia’s location and geopolitical situation required it to participate in multiple wars and conflicts over some 323 years to maintain ...

marked the first time that even remotely open and democratic elections had taken place in Russia since the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917. The 1989 elections can be viewed as the progenitor of the current political situation in Russia for it was those first elections that launched the long and rocky devolution of the centralized, one-party Soviet state into the multiparty Russian system that...

Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 58, nos. 4–5, July–August/September–October 2011, pp. 35–45. © 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1075–8216 / 2011 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/PPC1075-8216580403 Mark r. Beissinger is professor of politics and acting director of the Princeton institute for international and regional studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Nationalist Mob...