Demokratizatsiya最新文献

{"title":"Have Putin's Policies on Local Government Changed the Way Yaroslavl Is Governed?","authors":"Jeffrey W. Hahn","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.4.383-397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.4.383-397","url":null,"abstract":"Since 1990, the city of Yaroslavl, Russia, has provided me with a unique window for observing post-Communist Russia.1 One of the advantages of watching the changes in post-Communist Russia through the microcosm of this city is that it is not Moscow or St. Petersburg. Moscow and St. Petersburg are the centers of political life in Russia where the reforms are made; Yaroslavl is a small city beyond Moscow's direct jurisdiction where those reforms are implemented. Moscow and St. Petersburg are cosmopolitan and ethnically heterogeneous; Yaroslavl is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian. Most important, perhaps, the pace of life moves more slowly in Yaroslavl, allowing one to see the effects of the rapid changes initiated in Moscow in more nuanced detail.I have visited Yaroslavl more than a dozen times. I first went in the spring of 1990, when perestroika was already being felt. I was one of a team of American specialists on Russia who were among the first to observe the workings of regional politics in Soviet Russia firsthand and to conduct interviews with local officials.2 I conducted survey research on political attitudes among a fully representative sample of the population in March 1990. The survey research project coincided with the first truly competitive elections in Russia. I observed the Yaroslavtsy as they came to the polls to choose their city, regional, and national deputies. The survey research was replicated in 1993, 1996, and 2004, allowing a longitudinal view of changes in public opinion about political and economic reform.3 My repeat visits enabled me to view the evolution of Yaroslavl's political institutions. Because what I was observing was unfolding on a smaller stage, I could see more easily what changes occurred from one year to the next. Yaroslavl became my prism. Many of the results of my research from 1990 to 2000 appeared in Regional Russia in Transition: Studies from Yaroslavl', which was published in 2001.4In this article, I assess how Yaroslavl's political institutions have changed since 2000 and compare those changes with the transformations that took place between 1990 and 1993 and those that followed the post-1993 constitutional order. The timing is propitious in that May 2008 marked the end of Vladimir Putin's second term as Russia's president. Therefore, I examine the impact that his leadership has had on local government in Yaroslavl and how Yaroslavl's city government changed between 2000 and 2008, when Putin was president. I also explore the impact Yaroslavl's municipal government has had on the life of its inhabitants. How important are decisions taken by the city's government and has its role increased or decreased? Are politics in Yaroslavl more determined locally or by the central government's efforts to assert control?To investigate these questions, I begin by examining the initial transformation of Yaroslavl's political institutions between 1990 and 1993. I then examine the new institutions that were introduced","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"37 1","pages":"383-397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79898810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Uncertain Future: Sino-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century","authors":"H. Pirchner","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.4.309-322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.4.309-322","url":null,"abstract":"Two countries top almost everyone's list of nations that are most important to the United States. One has been a rapidly ascendant power for more than twenty years. The other has only recently begun to recover from the collapse of its empire. One is important because of its size and fast-growing economic and military power. The other's importance is based on its impressive nuclear arsenal, huge petroleum assets, and strategic location. These countries are China and Russia.The United States pursues its relationship with both countries in a bilateral fashion. However, the status of Russia and China's relationship with one another has the ability to dramatically impact the United States' relations with both countries. For example, the Nixon-era cooperation between China and the United States occurred in part because of China's fear of war with the much stronger Soviet Union. By the late 1990s, improved Sino-Russian relations led to a common diplomatic front against a variety of U.S. interests.An Uneasy AllianceA few years later, Russia's move toward the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was, to some degree, encouraged by Russia's interest in hedging its bets should relations with China sour. By 2007, however, the United States' preemptive war in Iraq and American support of the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine deeply alarmed Russia's national security establishment, which fears further American political or military action in the former Soviet republics-territories in which Russia wishes to be the dominant foreign power. Russia has sought to counteract this trend by drawing closer to China to offset U.S. unpredictability and \"meddling\" in former Soviet territory, which many Russians view as their backyard.1 Nevertheless, however bold the Sino-Russian pronouncements on the need for a multipolar world may be, the countries' interaction in other areas reflects caution, if not deep-seated distrust. This wariness will continue to mitigate the intensity of Russia's cooperation with China in opposition to U.S. interests.In formulating U.S. policy toward both countries, it is indispensable to know how the Sino-Russian relationship will evolve-and why.Over the last decade, cooperation between Russia and China has increased dramatically. It now includes military sales, joint military research and development, common diplomatic positions (e.g., Chechnya, Taiwan, U.S. missile defense), nonmilitary trade, and the settlement of border issues. To a large extent, this cooperation was formally codified in the July 16, 2001, Russia-China Treaty on Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.2As in previous treaties, (e.g., the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, and the 1860 Treaty of Beijing), this agreement between China and Russia was driven primarily by a mutual need for:(1) Peace on the border. As long as a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan remains a possibility, China does not want to commit the resources ne","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"76 1","pages":"309-322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74638013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Limited Choices: Russian Opposition Parties and the 2007 Duma Election","authors":"Nicklaus Laverty","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.4.363-382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.4.363-382","url":null,"abstract":"The December 2007 Russian Duma election, which Russian President Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party (YeR) won in an overwhelming fashion, did not use the same electoral rules that had structured parlimentary elections from 1993 until 2003.1 Before 2005, when the change was implemented, the 450-member Duma was selected through a combined electoral system in which half the seats were filled via a party list and half were drawn from single-member districts (SMDs) in Russia's eighty-nine regions. This system produced party ballots with frequently fluctuating numbers of parties, and SMD ballots with large numbers of independents. In an effort to expedite the party consolidation process, the 2005 law abolished SMD seats and extended the party lists to encompass all 450 seats. In addition, the vote threshold required for representation was increased from 5 percent to 7 percent.one of the highest thresholds in the world (rivaled by the 7 percent required for the Polish Sejm and exceeded by the 10 percent required for the Turkish Grand National Assembly). To ensure the maintenance of \"partyness,\" the law also stipulated that parliament members could not change their party affiliation after getting elected and that the candidates themselves must undergo a two-stage evaluation process by the Central Election Commission. Finally, the law prohibited the formation of party blocs, requiring each party to possess official registration, dovetailing with the 2001 law, On Political Parties, that raised the number of members and regional branches required for registration.2 All of these changes obviously pose a strategic problem for Russia's political parties: they must learn to adapt to the new rules to remain relevant as representational organizations. Most of all, the new electoral formula was a challenge to the opposition parties that saw their support decline in the 2003 Duma election.namely, the democratic parties Yabloko and Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).3 In this article, I explore how these parties have responded to the electoral changes and what factors have influenced these strategies. The first part of this article examines Yabloko and the SPS, both of which failed to individually pass the 5 percent threshold in the 2003 election and were unable to combine into a single party for the 2007 election as a means of overcoming the daunting 7 percent threshold. I also look into the decline of the KPRF, which suffered a major reversal of support in the 2003 election that continued into the 2007 election. Finally, because the setbacks for these parties have not occurred in a vacuum, the last part of this article deals with the nature of the system itself and how it has limited opposition parties' choices. This includes a discussion of the hegemonic influence of the Putin regime (and, by extension, YeR), its use of administrative resource, and the role of client parties (the Liberal Democratic Party of ","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"4 1","pages":"363-382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89598277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Standard oil and Yukos in the context of early capitalism in the United States and Russia","authors":"V. Volkov","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.240-264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.240-264","url":null,"abstract":"In January 1906, Missouri State Attorney General Herbert S. Hadley began court hearings to prove that the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, and the Republic Oil Company were parts of a single monopolistic conspiracy. He issued one of his thirty-four subpoenas to John D. Rockefeller, the most powerful business tycoon in the United States and the founder of Standard Oil. Rockefeller ignored the subpoena, leaving the agitated press to speculate about his whereabouts. In June, David Watson, the Attorney General of Ohio, announced his resolve to prosecute Standard Oil for violating the state's antitrust law. In November, U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte began prosecution of Standard Oil of New Jersey under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the same month, the Circuit Court of Missouri opened a lawsuit against Rockefeller and his closest associates to dissolve Standard Oil of New Jersey, the holding company controlling more than sixty other companies. Thus began a massive attack against America's largest oil company and its owners. From November 18 to 20, 1908, Rockefeller gave three days of court testimony. In November 1909, the first court announced its decision to dissolve Standard Oil of New Jersey, which Standard Oil immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 15, 1911, Chief Justice Edward Douglas White announced the final verdict: the Court required Standard Oil to divest itself of all its subsidiaries within six months. It took the federal government, first under President Theodore Roosevelt, and then under President William Howard Taft, more than five years to disassemble what was then the world's biggest oil company.1On July 2, 2003, Russian law-enforcement authorities arrested billionaire Platon Lebedev, chairman of the Board of Directors of Menatep, the oil giant Yukos's financial center. The General Procuracy charged Lebedev with financial fraud dating back to the 1993-94 privatization of the phosphate-producing plant Apatit, and with tax evasion by Menatep subsidiaries in Tomsk Oblast. On October 25, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos and one of Russia's leading tycoons, was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and theft. In October 2003, the General Procuracy froze 44 percent of Yukos stock (a major part of it belonging to Khodorkovsky and his closest associates). During 2004, Russia's Federal Taxation Ministry filed $27.5 billion in tax claims against Yukos for unpaid taxes and fines. On December 19, to meet the claim on Yukos's main assets, the oil mining company Yuganskneftegaz was auctioned and purchased for $9.35 billion by an unknown company that was later bought by the state oil company Rosneft for less than $30,000. It took the Russian federal authorities one and a half years to assert state control over Yuganskneftegaz, a company that produced 62 percent of all Yukos's oil. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were sentenced to eight years in prison.2Formally, in both cases, the s","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"13 1","pages":"240-264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75670012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Changing Federalism and the Islamic Challenge in Tatarstan","authors":"E. Ponarin","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.265-276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.265-276","url":null,"abstract":"Tatarstan-an autonomous ethnic republic within the Russian Federation dominated by traditionally Muslim Tatars-was at the forefront of nationalist mobilization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From 1990 to 1993, against a background of political rivalries in Moscow (first between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, then between Yeltsin and the parliament), the republic's leadership enjoyed virtual independence and consolidated its position vis-a-vis the federal government to win extraordinary concessions in a power-sharing treaty between the republic and Russia's central government. The republic's leadership insisted on being an equal partner with Moscow; retained a substantial share of federal taxes for the local budget; and enacted local laws that sometimes contradicted federal law.1 Tatar ethnicity and (especially) proficiency in the Tatar language were essential for advancing in many types of careers in the republic. Until recently, three-quarters of the Tatarstani legislature's (Gossovet) members were ethnic Tatars, even though Tatars barely constituted a majority of the population. During his tenure, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin slowly eroded Tatarstan's independence. Putin rescinded all Tatarstani laws found to contradict federal law and enforced fiscal discipline, and the Moscow headquarters of the ruling United Russia Party demanded its Tatarstani representatives revise the Gossovet's ethnic composition.2Although the Russian federal leadership's reasons for making these changes are clear, their methods of doing so without encountering substantial resistance from the republic's leadership or the Tatarstani nationalist movement's popular leaders are not. I use the example of Tatarstan to examine the ease with which the cental government regained the ground lost to some ethnic republics during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin conflict and Yeltsin's first term as president. Because Tatar nationalism and Islamic tradition were so instrumental to Tatarstan after 1991, I also examine the history of the Volga republic's Islamic renaissance, and the prospects of politicized Islam.Stage One: A Game of NationalismIn the late 1980s, as the Soviet grip on free speech and political organization loosened, nationalistic Tatarstanis mobilized to improve the status of the republic and their native culture. After Russia declared sovereignty on June 12, 1990, Tatarstan sought to elevate its status from an autonomous region within the Russian Federation to a union republic within the Soviet Union. Tatarstan and other autonomous regions, such as Chechnya, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia, profited greatly from Gorbachev and Yeltsin's 1989-91 rivalry. In the context of this power struggle, Yeltsin suggested in 1990 that the leaders of Tatarstan \"take as much independence as you can\"-warning if they seceded, the \"decision will be final.\"3 However, even after the Soviet Union's collapse and Gorbachev's fall from power, Yeltsin d","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"5 1","pages":"265-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82526406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kravchuk and Yeltsin at Reelection","authors":"David C. Brooker","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.294-304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.294-304","url":null,"abstract":"Russia and Ukraine are seemingly on different trajectories. Even as some of the excitement generated by the Orange Revolution fades amidst disagreements, recriminations, and betrayals by the political parties that were behind it, Ukraine is still a functioning, albeit messy, electoral democracy. Meanwhile, Russia has moved away from even the most basic standard of democracy. At a time when Russia and Ukraine are on divergent paths, it is useful to look back on a time when the two countries were at similar crossroads and to consider the factors that led to different paths being followed. The crossroad in question is the reelection campaigns of the first post-Soviet presidents for both countries-Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Leonid Kravchuk in Ukraine.Yeltsin and Kravchuk shared many similarities. They came from analogous backgrounds and their careers in some ways paralleled each other. They became leaders of their home republics under Mikhail Gorbachev, which put them in a position to become president of their newly independent countries when the Soviet Union collapsed. Even the timing of their elections was similar.The parallels continued once they were in office. Both faced significant opposition from their respective country's parliament, although they differed greatly in their responses to this opposition. Kravchuk compromised whereas Yeltsin used the military. Both saw their popularity drop as their terms wore on. A second significant difference between them, and the one that is this article's focus, is how their first term ended. Yeltsin won reelection in a tainted election while Kravchuk was defeated. This made Kravchuk a rarity among post-Soviet leaders. Of the fifteen \"first presidents\" of Soviet successor states, only Kravchuk and Mircea Snegur of Moldova were defeated in direct elections.1An examination of these two individuals' reelection campaigns can shed light on the role of political leaders in the democratization process. Some argue that leaders, particularly of newly established countries, can have a significant impact on democratic development. John Dryzek and Leslie Holmes noted this importance, particularly in the post-Soviet world:Post-communist societies often lack not only civil society . . . but also the institutions, civic traditions, and culture of compromise that can make liberal democracy work, and can avoid a slide into political chaos and/or dictatorship. In this light the key to democratic consolidation is effective state leadership committed to democratic and constitutional principles.2A president's approach to the prospect of leaving power can have a tremendous impact on democratization. Of all the precedents established by first presidents, few may be more important. An initial leader agreeing to participate in a competitive election (or more to the point, allowing an election to be competitively contested by the opposition) can create political pressure on subsequent leaders to take similar steps. There is no way ","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"149 1","pages":"294-304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86131754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Double Monopoly and Its Technologists: The Russian Preemptive Counterrevolution.","authors":"A. Etkind, A. Shcherbak","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.229-239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.229-239","url":null,"abstract":"(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Ukraine's Orange Revolution captivated Russian political elites' attention like few other events in recent decades. A small segment of these elites welcomed the Oranges's victory, but a far larger portion cursed it. Neither side would deny, however, that these events have built a new frame of reference for Russian politics. Subsequent events, such as the 2006 \"gas war,\" which the Russian government unsuccessfully launched against Ukraine, added to ambivalent sentiments of hostility and dependency. Frightened by a pro-European revolution in a country that Russian elites historically called \"Little Russia\" and perceived as a backward, though culturally similar, colony since the eighteenth century, the Russian leadership revised and radicalized its policies. The Kremlin's speeches and actions revealed that it desired two monopolies: control over energy and control over the application of violence.The rhetorical shift from liberalism and modernization to the self-conscious reliance on this double monopoly became prominent only during Russian President Vladimir Putin's second term. In his first term, Putin and his administration maintained a general interest in such issues as democracy, social capital, the knowledge economy, support of small businesses, competitiveness, and so on.1 With energy revenue steadily rising, however, the Kremlin lost interest. The actual solidification of this new political stance emerged because of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. Russian leaders found themselves presiding over political processes determined by events beyond their control. In central and eastern European countries, peaceful revolutions in the late 1980s and the early 1990s were not entirely autonomous. The political crises' domestic origins interacted with external models and pressures, which restricted national governments' ability to use force. When one country's revolution causes a chain reaction in other states with similar political regimes, scholars typically talk about \"contagion,\" \"the domino effect,\" or \"the export of democracy.\"2 Evidently, exporting and importing political regimes is easier when partners are geographically and culturally close. In eastern Europe, Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech caused the Hungarian Revolution. In 1989, Soviet perestroika led to the eastern European velvet revolutions. Communism's collapse in eastern Europe consequently influenced political struggles in the Soviet Union.3 Later, the Soviet Union's disintegration served as the template used in the Balkans. The Serbian electoral revolution influenced similar processes in Georgia and Ukraine. The Georgian Rose Revolution's success was especially important for Ukraine. Currently, Russian political debate rarely goes without a reference-hostile, envious, or ambivalent-to the Orange Revolution.The Technologists' Democratic DecorationsIn Russia and Ukraine, the ruling regimes consolidated their power while holding o","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"311 1","pages":"229-239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79987574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Patients in Contemporary Russian Reproductive Health Care Institutions: Strategies of Establishing Trust","authors":"A. Temkina, E. Zdravomyslova","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.277-293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.277-293","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Russian reproductive health care systems have undergone many changes since the 1990s. These changes have given users new opportunities, and users have become more demanding and knowledgeable. At the same time, patients distrust health care institutions and practitioners, which remains one of the Russian reproductive health care's most significant problems. The authors focus on public and private reproductive health care encounters from the patients' perspectives, concentrate on the women's experiences during pregnancy and delivery, explain patients' distrust of medical institutions, and examine the coping strategies patients develop to establish trust. Young, active, educated women do not want to be treated as Soviet patients--disciplined, ignorant, and obedient. They want to find a trustworthy doctor and receive reliable, comfortable, and proximate medical service. Keywords: distrust, health care, reproduction, Russia, strategies, women ********** Russian reproductive health care systems have undergone enormous changes since the 1990s. These changes reflect the economic breakdown of the state health care system, the commercialization of medical services, and attempts to solve Russia's demographic problems. These changes have not only given users new choices and opportunities but have also created unequal access to quality medical services. Russian attitudes toward reproductive health practices have also changed. Women have become more demanding and knowledgeable: they are consciously involved in family planning, including contraceptive use and the exploration of health care options on the Internet. However, patients' widespread distrust of both health care institutions and individual practitioners remains one of Russian reproductive health care's most significant dilemmas. (1) The issue of trust in medical institutions has been analyzed, starting with Talcott Parsons's classical model of clinical encounter, (2) but there have been few previous studies about this problem in the Russian reproductive health system. (3) Here, we focus on encounters in public and private reproductive health clinics from the patients' perspectives, concentrating on women's experiences during pregnancy and delivery. Following a bottom-up strategy of grounded theory (the \"systematic inductive guidelines for collecting and analyzing data for middle-range theoretical frameworks that explain the collected data\"), we reconstructed the leitmotif (master code) using thematic in-depth interviews. (4) This leitmotif is: \"We do not trust/believe our medicine/doctors.\" The leitmotif is exacerbated by patients' experiences in reproductive health care institutions. We also examine how women cope with needed medical assistance despite the trust deficit. We investigate patients' trust in public (insurance-covered and for-fee) and private (commercial) reproductive health services. We find that although women distrust both, they still confront the medical institutions and dev","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"18 1","pages":"277-293"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75470177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Nontraditional Approaches to Russian Politics and Security","authors":"H. Balzer","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.3.212-228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.3.212-228","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This introduction to a special section of Demokratizatsiya describes the European University at St. Petersburg/Georgetown University project on \"New Approaches to Russian Politics and Security.\" The guest editor reviews the literature on nontraditional approaches to security studies, illustrates the policy reasons for applying some of these concepts in the Russian context, and introduces the section's four articles. Keywords: nontraditional security, politics, Russia, security studies ********** The Soviet system's demise created a tremendous opportunity to unleash creative energies that had been ideologically constrained for decades. Even though some individuals ingeniously pushed the USSR's intellectual boundaries, most Soviet social scientists worked within the established Socialist paradigm. The opportunities to \"break out\" were greater in Central Europe than in the Soviet Union. Despite high hopes for new collaborative efforts, post-1991 scholarship has failed to produce much paradigm shifting. In Russia, the country that dominated Soviet social science, the stronger trend has become the defense of \"traditional\" analytical modes, not the challenge of old assumptions. There are exceptions, however. Several universities established since 1992 offer a blend of Russian and Western scholarly approaches. In the best cases, they expose students to Russian and Western (mirovoi, literally \"world\") scholarly literature. The Carnegie Corporation of New York invited the European University at St. Petersburg's political science and sociology faculty and Georgetown University's Government Department to explore potential synergies in a collaborative project involving scholars from both institutions. For three years, European University scholars developed their expertise in nontraditional approaches. During the project's final year, each of them spent time at Georgetown, presented their work at seminars, and consulted with American colleagues to sharpen their scholarship's focus. The four articles published here present some of the results from this collaboration. The Soviet system's collapse provided tremendous opportunities for scholars to rethink basic assumptions about politics and security. In the first months of 1992, almost anything seemed possible. This gave extra potency to existing efforts to encourage \"new thinking.\" In comparative politics, the \"transitions\" paradigm--the dominant discourse--was quickly challenged by a chorus of critics who accused \"shock therapists\" of \"market bolshevism.\" (1) In both economics and political analysis, opposing sides tended to talk past each other. Political debates often involved a basic difference between procedural and substantive definitions of democracy. Economic arguments were similarly procedural, but ever more bitter, with rapid-reform advocates focusing on process, whereas gradualists emphasized outcomes. After 1998, the focus increasingly shifted to nondemocratic systems, joining a growing li","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"34 1","pages":"212-228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75212495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russia's Borderline Personality","authors":"Fredo Arias-King, Arlene King de Arias, F. A. Canal","doi":"10.3200/DEMO.16.2.117-130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3200/DEMO.16.2.117-130","url":null,"abstract":"Any outsider who comes in contact with Russia soon realizes that it behaves in a fundamentally different way. Sometimes Russia reminds us of people we know, leading us to speculate that it must somehow have a collective personality, which makes it all the more challenging and alluring. We speak of Russia's mysterious \"deep soul\" (even \"slave soul\") gleamed by reading Fyodor Dostoevsky or listening to Aleksandr Skryabin. Fyodor Tyutchev famously remarked that Russia cannot be understood with the mind, only emotionally. Winston Churchill even more famously regretted that Russia \"is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.\" A Gorbachev supporter once praised the former Soviet leader as a master psychoanalyst who knew how to change Russia whereas others would have failed.1 A leading Western Sovietologist, Fiona Hill, once mentioned that Russia \"resembles a paranoid individual.\"2 Another one, Peter Rutland, warned that any attempt to dissect Russia's enigmatic personality is bound to raise more questions than answers. \"Expect the unexpected,\" he advised.3The observation that nations behave as individuals is anecdotal yet widespread, not really grounded academically, though both the realist and liberalist schools of international relations to some extent assume it. Development economists and even political scientists speak of whether a country has \"matured.\" Using Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories, Arthur Koestler spoke of the \"political neuroses\" of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom before, during, and after World War II.4 Russian analysts routinely use these tools to describe Russia, as have some Western specialists.5 Ambassador George F. Kennan in his 1946 \"Long Telegram\" and 1947 \"X\" article-probably the most influential early Cold War documents-spoke about \"psychological analysis\" in his attempt at dissecting the complex interactions of elites, history, and peoples that produced the Kremlin's \"neurotic\" views and actions.6In this spirit, we propose that Russia's behavior has a striking resemblance to what is known as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), which is one of the ten personality disorders recognized by the psychological and psychiatric academy. Whether this resemblance is purely coincidental or the result of some dynamic we dare not speculate about remains beyond any discipline or theories of which we are aware. But the parallel is so obvious that it would not be surprising if by stating it we accidentally plagiarized someone else. According to the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), a person can be diagnosed with BPD if they suffer from five of the following nine symptoms:1. Frantic effort to avoid real or imagined abandonment;2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation;3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self;4. Impulsiv","PeriodicalId":39667,"journal":{"name":"Demokratizatsiya","volume":"31 1","pages":"117-130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81470867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}