The Legacy of the Soviet Union
Language: English
Pages: 290
ISBN: 1349513776
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This text offers a distillation by a group of scholars of their experience of the post-Soviet years. Analysis of the post-Soviet landscape is accompanied by meditations on the impact of the post Soviet transition on both policy makers and academics. The book therefore examines both assumptions of transition and reconsiders the experience of Soviet communism in the light of its demise.
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The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia
special role on the territory of the USSR, which constituted its natural sphere of interest, reflected the view that Russian identity was inseparable from Union identity.21 As for the Russian State Duma, until 1999 it was dominated by opposition forces – the communists and the Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Both groups argued that Russian identity was closely connected with the Union, whose recreation they desired. As their programme minimum, the communists and the
nationalism and identity is structured should not be underestimated. Graham Smith rightly observed that the 32 Vera Tolz fact that the élites in the ethnic autonomies preferred to frame political struggles as centre–periphery rivalries rather than inter-ethnic ones indicated that federalism ‘can act as a counterweight to primordial nationalism’.39 In theory, such rhetoric does not promote exclusive ethnic identities, but reinforces a civic identity of titular and non-titular nationalities, at
about change. I was one of many historians working on the prewar period who assumed that the postwar period was essentially ‘more of the same’,19 so it came as quite a surprise when the opening of Soviet archives revealed all sorts of substantive differences. I remember vividly that as I read my first set of postwar Central Committee files I felt I had landed in another world than the one I knew from the 1930s archives. 8 Sheila Fitzpatrick If the postwar era was another world, that implied
procedures in combination with the necessary know-how to manipulate these codes to the firm’s advantage. The latter refers to sophisticated intelligence-gathering capacities and the informal use of blackmail files (kompromat), including copies of bank statements, currency transfers, business and real estate transactions and other official documents as well as general correspondence, personal information and unofficial transcripts of telephone conversations of a compromising nature. Rather than
own spending; they are not relying on hand-outs from above, derived from national tax collection in which their own input is small. It follows that the taxing of the more mobile tax bases (such as profits tax in a world of more-or-less footloose business) should generally be left to central government. At the other extreme, the taxation of particularly high-yielding, but immobile, natural resources (oil, gas, diamonds) located in only some regions of a country should also be a preserve of central