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...

“The transformation of a traditional society could only be achieved extremely slowly, and certainly not by wrecking its existing structure and relationships. Even in the Soviet Union there had been the ‘great mistakes’ of the 1920s and 1930s. As a Soviet official in Moscow was also reported as saying [in 1981], ‘If there is one country in the world where we would not like to try scientific soci...

I use the quality and quantity of energy flows to interpret economic, social, and political changes in the US and Former Soviet Union. The economic successes of both the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the US reflect an abundant supply of high quality energy. This abundance ended in the 1970s in the US and the 1980s in the Former Soviet Union. In the US, the end of cheap oil caused labor producti...

For several years, some of the countries of the former Soviet Union have experienced the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world, with the vast majority of reported infections contracted through injecting drug use. However, most governments of the region have been slow to recognize the severity of the problem. The scope and coverage of governmental HIV/AIDS programmes have remained very limit...

points z z In a historic reversal of fortunes, China is overtaking the territory of the former Soviet Union in GDP per capita. z z China's rapid economic development has been driven by 'regionally decentralized authoritarianism' (RDA). But only the economy is decentralized. Political centralization, the objectives and patronage of the centre, and the centre's relative performance evaluation are...

BACKGROUND Diaspora migration flows from the former Soviet Union to Western Europe and Israel have increased since the late 1980s. Risk factors responsible for the East-West mortality gap and post-migration factors may lead to higher mortality from external causes of death like suicide amongst such Diaspora immigrants. We investigated whether ethnic German immigrants from the former Soviet Unio...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union sovereign Islamic states arose in the traditional Islamic regions of the USSR, although Islam was not declared to be an official or state religion in the constitutions of these states, since, as before, religion was separated from the state. These states were: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. With the exception o...

History's nasty habit of repeating past tragedies in the form of a modernized farce threatens to confirm itself in the destiny of the Commonwealth of Independence States (CIS). This knowingly shaky and hurriedly tailored formation appeared on the ruins of the old Soviet Union in December of 1991 due to the efforts of three leaders of former Soviet republics--the presidenta of Russia and Ukraine...

BACKGROUND A systematic literature review was performed to investigate the occurrence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) in prisons located in countries formerly part of the Soviet Union. METHODS A systematic search of published studies reporting MDR TB occurrence in prisons located in former Soviet countries was conducted by probing PubMed and Cumulative Index Nursing and Allied He...