The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed PDF Download

Author: Linda J. Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674828001
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

View

Book Description
This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.

Author: Peter J. Boettke
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415085144
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 199

View

Book Description
Gorbachev's reforms brought high hopes in the West and empty shelves in the East. Why Perestroika Failed argues that successful reform is only possible on the basis of a sound understanding of market and political processes. Using an Austrian market process approach to analyse the economics of the Soviet system, and a public choice one to sound understanding of market and political address the political dimension, Boettke argues that Gorbachev's reforms were always destined to fail. In part perestroika failed because it was never really implemented. But nonetheless, even if all the major proposals and decrees had been scrupulously adhered to, they would not have produced the structural changes necessary to revive the former Soviet economy. Knowing why perestroika failed is crucially important as the former Soviet republics and East and Central Europe try and chart a new course.

Author: Judyth L. Twigg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315290235
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
This work shows that the collapse of socialist employment and social service systems - and of the USSR itself - has had profoundly damaging effects, manifested in dislocation and homelessness, ethnic strife, family breakdown, declining life expectancy, and soaring rates of violence and crime.

Author: Marcia A. Weigle
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271043630
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528

View

Book Description
A study of contemporary politics in Russia, assessing the attempted transition from totalitarianism to liberal democracy. It shows that although liberal institutions have been tentatively established, the weak social and cultural supports threaten the success of Russia's liberal project.

Author: Janetta Azarieva
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019768436X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
Food has been crucial to the functioning and survival of governments and regimes since the emergence of early states. Yet, only in a few countries is the connection between food and politics as pronounced as in Russia. Since the 1917 Revolution, virtually every significant development in Russian and Soviet history has been either directly driven by or closely associated with the question of food and access to it. In fact, food shortages played a critical role in the collapse of both the Russian Empire and the USSR. Under Putin's watch, Russia moved from heavily relying on grain imports to feed the population to being one of the world's leading food exporters. In Bread and Autocracy, Janetta Azarieva, Yitzhak M. Brudny, and Eugene Finkel focus on this crucial yet widely overlooked transformation, as well as its causes and consequences for Russia's domestic and foreign politics. The authors argue that Russia's food independence agenda is an outcome of a deliberate, decades-long policy to better prepare the country for a confrontation with the West. Moreover, they show that for the Kremlin, nutritional self-sufficiency and domestic food production is a crucial pillar of state security and regime survival. Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel also make the case that Russia's focus on food independence also sets the country apart from almost all modern autocracies. While many authoritarian regimes have adopted industrial import-substitution policies, in Putin's Russia it is the substitution of food imports with domestically produced crops that is crucial for regime survival. As food reemerges as a key global issue and nations increasingly turn inwards, Bread and Autocracy provides a timely and comprehensive look into Russia's experience in building a nutritionally autarkic dictatorship.

Author: Andrea Chandler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137343214
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

View

Book Description
Through compelling and insightful analysis of the Russian case, this book explores the role that social welfare plays in regime transitions. It examines the role that gender and social welfare has played in Russia's post-communist political evolution from Yeltsin's assumption of the presidency to Putin's return for a third term as president in 2012

Author: Thomas F. Remington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499718
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

View

Book Description
This book investigates the relationship between the character of political regimes in Russia's subnational regions and the structure of earnings and income. Based on extensive data from Russian official sources and surveys conducted by the World Bank, the book shows that income inequality is higher in more pluralistic regions. It argues that the relationship between firms and government differs between more democratic and more authoritarian regional regimes. In more democratic regions, business firms and government have more cooperative relations, restraining the power of government over business and encouraging business to invest more, pay more and report more of their wages. Average wages are higher in more democratic regions and poverty is lower, but wage and income inequality are also higher. The book argues that the rising inequality in postcommunist Russia reflects the inability of a weak state to carry out a redistributive social policy.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

View

Book Description
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.

Author: Thomas Lahusen
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3825806405
Category : Former Soviet republics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

View

Book Description
Economists and political scientists wrestle with the challenges faced by Russian officials and public alike in adapting to a market economy and democracy, including the fragility of property rights and elections still rooted in old institutional structures. This book examines the reforms of health and welfare, and the hierarchy of privilege and access, and consider how Putin's statist approach to mythmaking compares to that of previous Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. Historians and anthropologists explore the issue of nostalgia, gender, punishment, belief, and how history itself is being created and perceived today. The book concludes with a journey through the ruined landscape of real socialism.

Author: Michael Lebowitz
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673377
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
In this concise volume, noted scholar and economist Michael A. Lebowitz considers the legacy of twentieth century socialist societies, or what some have termed ?real socialism.? While these societies were able to claim major achievements in areas from health care to education to popular culture, they nonetheless met limited success in eroding what Marx called the ?opposition of the worker as direct producer and the proprietor of the means of production.? That this opposition between workers and managers continued to exist in one form or another under ?real socialism? means that, according to L