I agreed because I felt ashamed for our great country. —Nikolai Vorontsov on why he decided to accept the position as chief of the USSR State Committee for the Protection of Nature The Gorbachev administration went further than any of its predecessors in candidly acknowledging the extent of environmental damage in the Soviet Union and the need for new approaches to solving the problem. In addit...

The present article aims to examine Isaiah Berlin's views and ideas, and gives answers to the questions of how political goodness is linked to the concept of negative liberty in Berlin's thought,  and how his view of political goodness has formed his critique looking toward the political system of the Soviet Union. Political goodness in Berlin's thought seems to be multiplied, and from the plur...

marked the first time that even remotely open and democratic elections had taken place in Russia since the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917. The 1989 elections can be viewed as the progenitor of the current political situation in Russia for it was those first elections that launched the long and rocky devolution of the centralized, one-party Soviet state into the multiparty Russian system that...

F OLLOWING THE APRIL 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the Soviet government evacuated 135,000 people living in the immediate vicinity of the plant, mobilized workers to clean up the site and surrounding areas, and called on outside governments and organizations to render medical aid and help in the assessment of health effects related to radiation exposure. A series of contacts ...

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...

I would like to discuss the monetary and banking situation in my country. The last few years have witnessed quite a number of sweeping changes in the Soviet economy. These changes, including the decentralization of decision making, have substantially contributed to inflationary pressure. According to estimates by the State Statistical Bureau, inflation was 7% percent last year. This figure incl...

By utilizing biomedical instrumentation from other nations, and by designing and fabricating instrumentation in several institutes under the control of the Medical Industries Ministry and the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medical Sciences, the Soviet Union has attempted to a bridge a 20 to 30-year technology gap. The lack of interagency cooperation and sophisticated manufacturing capability, combined wit...