The countries emerging from the Soviet sphere of influence in the early 1990s inherited Soviet style hospital-dominated health care systems. The countries that were part of the Soviet Union, in particular, had much higher levels of provision, as assessed by numbers of hospital beds, than the countries of western Europe. This capacity has been reduced, forced in large part by shrinking health bu...

A popular and widespread theme in contemporary Russian cinema television is the Soviet past reconstructed with various degrees of accuracy. This “documentary desire” aspires not only to access historical reality through visual representations life 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, but use images as an instrument for emotional manipulation viewer by evoking creating “memories” those who do have experience...

The present article aims to examine Isaiah Berlin's views and ideas, and gives answers to the questions of how political goodness is linked to the concept of negative liberty in Berlin's thought,  and how his view of political goodness has formed his critique looking toward the political system of the Soviet Union. Political goodness in Berlin's thought seems to be multiplied, and from the plur...

Contemporary rural Viliui Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are a Turkicspeaking people practicing horse and cattle breeding in the subarctic. This article details their story of survival in the north as one not only of adapting a southern subsistence to an extreme climate but also to the effects of Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization, and post-Soviet decentralization. In the pos...

We compare the pattern of intergenerational social mobility late in Soviet-era Russia with data collected recently. We find evidence of a strong vertical hierarchy in the Russian occupational structure both during and after the Soviet era. Gender-typing shaped men’s and women’s occupational opportunities in Russia, but origins affected men and women similarly. Social mobility decreased slightly...

On 22 March 2012, Russian president-elect Vladimir Putin promised to develop new weapons based on advanced technologies, including genetics. Having just completed a history of the Soviet biological warfare (BW) program with Milton Leitenberg, I found Putin’s promise exceedingly threatening. It could signal a new Russian military effort to develop third-generation biological weapons agents, buil...

A characteristic feature of Russian post-communist transformation is a high rate of elite continuity that invites an explanation of the demise of the Soviet Union as the result of a rational choice made by its ruling elite. This paper proposes a political-economic model where predatory ruling elite uses costly coercion to raise revenue from the working population, while resistance of the popula...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation ("Russia") and former soviet satellite countries and republics of Central and Eastern Europe ("Soviet Bloc") have struggled with privatizing housing and establishing market-based residential mortgage systems. This thesis addresses the recent efforts of three former Soviet Bloc countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Polan...