MEDICAL JOURNAL Political dissent and "sluggish" schizophrenia in the Soviet Union "It is considered by some governments that if a person does not agree with the views of the state, his sanity must be called into question. Extensive documentation exists on the misuse of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in the Soviet Union."' Amnesty International, Bloch and Reddaway, and the International Assoc...

This paper presents a corpus analysis of the addresses that the leaders of the Soviet Union and Russia deliver every year before the New Year. The content of a New Year address is strongly codified and usually contains references to important events of the previous year. Analysis of the ways that the lexical patterns used in the New Year addresses are transformed and follow changes that have oc...

This paper is devoted to the theoretical conceptualization of political-economic processes within the Eurasian Economic Union. The author elaborates on this project within the framework of “global regionalization” and regards it as a fledging “global region.” In this paper, the European Union is analyzed as a model of the existing global region. The Eurasian region also has its own specific tra...

“What is the difference,” went an old joke in the Soviet Union, “between the Soviet and U.S. Constitutions? The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of speech; the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom after speech.” The joke captures the common intuition about the function (or dysfunction, rather) of constitutions in authoritarian regimes. Many other examples abound: citizens of North Korea m...

This paper traces the formal and informal allocation of vehicles by the Soviet administrative-command economy in the early and mid 1930s using the very same documents as did the Soviet dictator some 70 years earlier. Vehicles should present Soviet resource allocation in its most favorable light, since their production and allocation was highly centralized and tightly monitored. This case study,...

Thane Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia is reviewed and situated within some broader trends in research on Russian natural resource extraction in the oil industry. Gustafson’s book represents the high water mark of a particular genre of scholarship on oil and considerably improves our understandings on a wide range of fronts. However, a number of other methodo...

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s successor states have not made the smooth transition to liberal democracy that many in Europe and the United States had once expected. The Baltic states and most eastern European countries have transitioned to the status of “sustainable democracies,” but the rest of the Soviet Union’s successor states sit more along a continuum of auto...

Soviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project—the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the “new Soviet man.” The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical an...

area display a striking variety. Ignoring many important differences among Western countries, Soviet orthodoxy reduces the variation to a crude dichotomy between "capitalist" and "socialist" political systems. Taking the United States as a paradigm, it indicts "capitalist" states as the home of malpractice suits and (so far as I know) completely disregards statutory schemes for review of compla...

Computer Art in the (Former) Soviet Bloc Introduction I. Experimental visual art in Yugoslavia A. The Maoist Critique of Yugoslavia 1. Revolutionary Definitions 2. Criticisms of Tito B. New Tendencies 1. NAMA DEPARTMENT STORE 2. Other Examples of New Tendencies C. The Successors to New Tendencies: II. Computer art in East Germany A. Programme Funken! B. Computer Art in DDR C. Conclusions D. Pos...