INTRODUCTION The Russian Revolution of October 1917 resulted in a transfer of power from the autocratic Tsar Nicholas II to the Bolshevik Party and the subsequent establishment of the world's first socialist state. The victorious revolutionaries inherited from the Tsarist regime a politically, culturally, and linguistically complex situation, with over 100 million citizens speaking no less than...

the relationship between moscow and the peripheral republics of the soviet :union: has been a controversial issue. the complicatedness and implications of this relationship was to a degree recognized during the soviet era. yet it was after the collapse of the communist regime that its real scope and significance were revealed, especially in central asian and caucasian republics where a variety ...

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...

Party politics in the former Soviet Union is fundamentally different from party politics in Western democracies in many ways. Since 1991, two crucial aspects of party politics in the less-than-democratic former Soviet republics have been the impact of authoritarian practices on party politics and the volatile nature of party politics. Starting with the observation that the creation and operatio...

It must seem to many people that the collapse of the Soviet Union (and the planned economies of Eastern Europe) effectively ends the socialist calculation debate, with a decisive verdict in favour of the market. We argue that this conclusion is unwarranted. Soviet socialism presented a specific form of planning with definite shortcomings of its own, and its collapse need not rule out alternativ...

The military-biological complex of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a true Frankenstein's Monster, with a powerful scientific potential--or good and for ill. This article examines both the direct scientific results of the twin biological weapons (BWs) programmes run by the 'civilian' Biopreparat and by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the public health benefits that sprang, d...

a. Since World War II, the Soviet Union has represented the principal threat to the national security interests of the US. During this period, the military capability of the Soviet Armed Forces grew enormously. Starting in the later years of the 1980's, the international security environment has undergone rapid, fundamental, and revolutionary changes. The Soviet Union has disintegrated with the...