This article explores the impact of the professional culture of rocket engineering in Stalin’s Soviet Union on the engineering and organizational practices of the space program during the Khrushchev era. The Stalinist legacy and the dual military / civilian character of rocket engineers’ work profoundly affected the identity of this elite part of Soviet technical intelligentsia. Focusing on suc...

Background: The Slavic countries of the former Soviet Union (fSU) Russia, Belarus and Ukraine retain one of the highest suicide rates in the world, despite a gradual decline over the past decade. Aims: The present study aims to analyze whether population drinking is able to explain the dramatic fluctuations in suicide mortality in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine from the late Soviet to post-Soviet ...

Ten years ago Dr. Belding brought out the first edition of this text and in the present volume follows the original plan of presenting "the protozoan, helminthic, and arthropod parasites of man, and the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of the diseases they produce." Although more material has been compressed into each page and thinner paper permits a convenient reduction in its thickness, t...

The Anti-plague system experienced a dramatic expansion in Soviet times. From the dozen facilities created in the Russian Empire, it grew during the Soviet period to include over 100 facilities engaged in public health activities as well as BW-related work. This article describes how this highly responsive public health system, created to respond to natural outbreaks of dangerous diseases, beca...

After World War II, the large-scale Soviet agricultural production model was spread into the satellite states of CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). In spite of this, planned economic agricultural production was far from homogenous. This diversity – appearing inside and outside the Soviet Union – is worthwhile exploring, here represented by two of the most (in relative terms) productive agricultu...

The design and implementation team of computer automation systems for the Polish power industry faced many difficult problems connected with the lack of experience in this domain in the country. Another kind of problems was implied by different levels of information and communication technology in that country and in well developed ones. The differences were generated by both internal (importat...

he development of the Russian federal system has been marked by conflict, co-optation, and consensus. Emerging from the generally unitary Russian republic within a formally federal but largely unitary Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia began its development as a federal system with little experience and few institutional structures salvageable from the earlier system. The patchwork Soviet-era con...

The collapse of the Soviet system caused critical changes in migratory processes. The five chaotic years that have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union have witnessed the emergence of a new economic system and the creation of new, sovereign political entities from fragments of the FSU. In this chapter, migratory trends in the former Soviet Union from 1990 through 1994 are analyzed in l...

The former Soviet anti-plague system stands today as a little-known but profoundly important proliferation challenge facing the international community. The Soviet Union managed this unique system, consisting of more than 80 facilities, to control deadly endemic diseases and to prevent the spread of exotic pathogens. Until recently, however, the anti-plague system’s other role—contributing to t...

Few studies have attempted to examine analytically various aspects of the contract enforcement institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Researchers agree that the lack of legislation for improving the operation of the legal system, which in turn would enhance the ability of exchange, is producing severe obstacles for economic growth. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the administrative hi...