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...

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...

Light therapy is still used to treat a number of common diseases in Russia. The practice is firmly anchored in history: Soviet clinical practice was divorced from the emerging field of evidence-based medicine. Medical researchers were cut off from international medical research and scientific literature, with much Soviet scientific activity based on a particular socialist ideology. In this stud...

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This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, fi lm, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause of space exploration in early twentieth-century Russia originally stem...

Some aspects of the history of the first Soviet computer development are described. The idea of this work was offered by Sergey Lebedev who formulated the principles, wrote a plan and suggested the structure of the computer which was named BESM – Fast Electronic Calculating Machine. Some new documents are presented – a working notebook with Lebedev's handwritten notes and a plan of a preliminar...

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...

One problem with the term "common heritage of mankind" is that it seems to have substantially different meanings to different people. To some it conjures a highly communistic vision of the proceeds from resource exploitation being monetarily distributed to every human being. The record of negotiation on the Moon Agreement shows that the Soviet Union was more jealous of its planetary prerogative...

Governor Crow has given us an excellent summary of the issues and options in controlling inflation. I will focus my remarks on the application of the points that he made to the case of the Soviet Union, which I do in part because I've thought more about the Soviet Union than about the inflation problems elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but also because I think that perhaps it is in the Soviet Union...