Reforming the Russian Legal System is a comprehensive analysis of the forces that are shaping legal reform in the republics of the former USSR. Looking beneath the flow of day-to-day developments, the book examines how traditional indigenous Russian legal values, and the 74-year experience with communism and 'socialist legality' are being combined with Western concepts of justice and due process to forge a new legal consciousness in Russia today. The author provides a broad historical survey of pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era legal developments, which provides a backdrop to the reforms initiated by Gorbachev. Chapters analysing constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, the Procuracy, and the laws governing the transition to a market economy illustrate the recurring themes of the book: the interaction of crosscurrents in Russian legal culture, and variations in the pace of legal reform from republic to republic and region to region.

Dramatic and confusing changes in what used to be the Soviet Union have transformed the world in which we live. Communist rule has given way to multiparty politics; a command economy is being painfully privatised; almost every social and cultural value has been overturned; and perestroika has now been swept away by the reforming policies of Boris Yeltsin. In turn, these policies are now challenged by a variety of conservative and nationalist forces. This fourth edition of Stephen White's best-selling introductory text has been revised throughout. A new final chapter charts the first turbulent years of Yeltsin's troubled presidency and the background to his radical policies. Clearly written but detailed and authoritative, After Gorbachev, like its predecessors, will continue to provide an unrivalled guide to the processes of transition, upheaval, and collapse which now characterise Russia and the post-Soviet republics.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of fifteen independent states on its former territory is one of the most momentous developments of the twentieth century. In this volume, five leading international scholars team up to examine the forces that lay behind the rise of national movements which challenged, then destroyed, the stability and territorial integrity of the former Soviet state offering unique insights into the links between political structure and nationalism. Presenting a broad and timely analysis of the national dimension of politics after perestroika, this book is essential reading for all those seeking to understand the complexities underlying the demise of the Soviet state, as well as the emergence of new states actively engaged in defining their national identities at home and abroad.

This is the first book to analyse the relationship between the Soviet state and society from the October Revolution of 1917 to the revolution under Stalin of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Professor Lewis Siegelbaum examines the ways in which the promise of a new society made by the 1917 Revolution informed the thinking of those who had experienced the order which preceded it. But how did that old order limit possibilities? How did the new Party leaders, worker activists, artists, and scientists know what to abolish, what to retain, and what to transform? The author explores these questions by tracing the evolution of the ruling Communist Party and its New Economic Policy and the changing fortunes of industrial workers, peasants, and the scientific and cultural intelligentsia. He demonstrates how these different actors sought to appropriate the promise of the 1917 Revolution for their own purposes, highlights the compromises they made, and explains why in the late 1920s these compromises had started to break down.

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this 1991 work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of Soviet economic thought and theory. Dr Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform programme of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. V. Kantorovich and his followers. However, this programme failed and the author explains in some detail why this happened. Since then, Soviet economists have tried to abandon their traditional theory of central planning and move along the path and long established contacts with leading Soviet economists, Pekka Sutela is able to show how Soviet economic thinking has moved from dogmatism through reformism to pragmatism.