Russian geopolitical culture and public opinion: the masks of Proteus revisited

In this paper, we build on the work of Graham Smith, who was developing a critical geopolitics of Russia in his posthumous paper of 1999, published in this journal. Like Smith, we link the evolving geopolitical orientations of Russia to the search for a post-Soviet identity amongst its citizens and its political leadership. While Smith saw a core concept in Russian geopolitics having Protean masks, it is the leadership of the Russian state, specifically President Putin, who has successfully adopted a Protean strategy to appeal to the disparate elements of the Russian geopolitical spectrum. Based on a nationwide survey in spring 2002, we identify six clusters in Russian public opinion by socio-demographic characteristics and we connect each cluster to the main geopolitical orientations competing in contemporary Russia, including democratic statism and the increasingly marginalized Eurasianism that formed the core subject of Smith's paper.     

俄罗斯中国新移民现状及其课题研究

1991年以来的俄罗斯中国新移民是一个涉及面广泛的问题, 这一问题的复杂性及其对俄罗斯产生的正负面影响, 在俄罗斯引起了广泛争议。本文分析俄罗斯中国新移民产生的背景、特点及其人口统计学特征, 探讨俄罗斯官方对中国新移民的态度和政策, 概述俄罗斯各方面专家学者对这一问题的研究与看法。作者认为, 要很好地解决这一问题, 需要俄中两国开展明确的具有建设性的合作, 需要一个加强双边关系的更强大的社会平台, 也需要俄罗斯方面实行一种平衡的移民政策。     

Moscow in the 1990s: Market Reform and the Central City

The built environmental reflects in tangible ways the values of the societies of which it is a part. Soviet cities developed in accordance with the precepts of socialism for more than half a century, and nowhere were the consequences more palpable than in the central city. The present paper examines changes in urban development and management now under way in Moscow as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of fundamental economic and political restructuring. More specifically it explores the impact of the new political economy on central Moscow's employment structure, housing stock, and land use, and assesses the attitudes of business representatives and residents to these changes. 5 figures, 2 tables, 25 references.     

Observations On State Trading in the Russian Economy

The paper presents an overview of state trading activities in Russia in light of that country's prospective accession to the World Trade Organization. The authors cover the origins of Russian state trading, developments after the collapse of the USSR, state involvement in barter trade, and its control of the organizational structure and remaining monopolies; they also attempt to estimate the government's share in Russia's foreign trade turnover in 1996 and mid-1997. A discussion of implications embraces issues relating to the inefficiencies of state trading and Russia's designation as a nonmarket economy by the United States and the countries of the European Union. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F13, F14, K33, N20, P33. 1 table, 20 references.     

Entre el oro y la plata: Quito,el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada y el movimiento de mercancías norandino a fines del siglo XVIII

El artículo contribuye a un análisis cuantitativo de las relaciones económicas entre la Real Audiencia de Quito y el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada a fines del siglo XVIII. A partir de un análisis sistemático de fuentes alcabalatorias, el ejercicio mide el flujo de mercancías entre ambas economías. En particular, analiza a nivel agregado y regional la estructura de los intercambios estableciendo su volumen en términos reales y nominales, su grado de concentración y su evolución en el tiempo. La investigación muestra que, a nivel agregado, la importancia recíproca de las dos economías obliga a abandonar una tradición historiográfica que ha escindido el análisis de lo que sin duda era una región fundamental del sistema económico colonial.     

Local Self-Government and Administrative Oversight

An examination of the zemstvos, Russia's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiment in local self-government, can offer lessons and warnings for modern administrative reforms that will be at least as useful as comparisons with Western countries.