Socio-Economic Foundations of the Russian Post-Soviet Regime PDF Download

Author: Simon Kordonsky
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838267753
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Simon Kordonsky divides the social structure of contemporary Russia into distinct estates or social groups and describes each organization’s unique resource-based political and economic nature. As he guides readers through Russia’s peculiar service and support estate system, Kordonsky reveals how remarkably effective inventing and institutionalizing threats can be in the distribution of scarce resources in a social system of this kind. His book emphasizes the fundamental differences between resource-based economies and traditional risk-based economies and their role in Russia’s future.

Author: Bálint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863708
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

Author: Vladimir Tikhomirov
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312230869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book deals with general political and economic developments that took place in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The major aim of this book is to analyze successes and failures of the Russian reform attempts, as well as their effect on the development of Russian regions, particularly from the point of view of interrelation between socio-economic tendencies and political developments. Analysis concentrates on both national dynamics and dynamics of development in three main groups of regions: mining, agricultural and manufacturing.

Author: David J. O'Brien
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN: 9780801869600
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia reviews change in agricultural and rural life since 1990 through historical, political, sociological, and anthropological investigation. The contributors' interest is not so much in agriculture itself but in agrarian issues such as the relationship between rural interests and changing Russian institutions, the economic and social organization of rural households, and the quality of life in rural families and villages.

Author: Marshall I. Goldman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134376847
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires.

Author: Alfred B. Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317460456
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A vibrant civil society - characterized by the independently organized activity of people as citizens, undirected by state authority - is an essential support for the development of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. Thus it has been one important indicator of the success of post-communist transitions. This volume undertakes a systematic analysis of the development of civil society in post-Soviet Russia. An introduction and two historical chapters provide background, followed by chapters that analyze the Russian context and consider the roles of the media, business, organized crime, the church, the village, and the Putin administration in shaping the terrain of public life. Eight case studies then illustrate the range and depth of actual citizen organizations in various national and local community settings, and a concluding chapter weighs the findings and distills comparisons and conclusions.

Author: Fiona Hill
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815796188
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them––not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly––it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities communist planners left for it out in the cold.

Author: Stephen J. Collier
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.

Author: Ruslan Dzarasov
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745332789
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this book Ruslan Dzarasov reveals the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in both the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. He provides an unprecedented analysis of Russian firms' corporate governance and labor practices, and makes sense of their peculiar investment strategies. By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behavior of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system. This groundbreaking study proves that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but is in fact the continuation of that tradition. At the same time, the brutal and deficient character of the current system also reflects the realities of the modern globalized and financialized world capitalist system.

Author: Michael Alexeev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199344132
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
By 1999, Russia's economy was growing at almost 7% per year, and by 2008 reached 11th place in the world GDP rankings. Russia is now the world's second largest producer and exporter of oil, the largest producer and exporter of natural gas, and as a result has the third largest stock of foreign exchange reserves in the world, behind only China and Japan. But while this impressive economic growth has raised the average standard of living and put a number of wealthy Russians on the Forbes billionaires list, it has failed to solve the country's deep economic and social problems inherited from the Soviet times. Russia continues to suffer from a distorted economic structure, with its low labor productivity, heavy reliance on natural resource extraction, low life expectancy, high income inequality, and weak institutions. While a voluminous amount of literature has studied various individual aspects of the Russian economy, in the West there has been no comprehensive and systematic analysis of the socialist legacies, the current state, and future prospects of the Russian economy gathered in one book. The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy fills this gap by offering a broad range of topics written by the best Western and Russian scholars of the Russian economy. While the book's focus is the current state of the Russian economy, the first part of the book also addresses the legacy of the Soviet command economy and offers an analysis of institutional aspects of Russia's economic development over the last decade. The second part covers the most important sectors of the economy. The third part examines the economic challenges created by the gigantic magnitude of regional, geographic, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of Russia. The fourth part covers various social issues, including health, education, and demographic challenges. It will also examine broad policy challenges, including the tax system, rule of law, as well as corruption and the underground economy. Michael Alexeev and Shlomo Weber provide for the first time in one volume a complete, well-rounded, and essential look at the complex, emerging Russian economy.