The monograph is focused on the issues relevant to the origination and development of the Russian defence industry complex. The adopted historical approach facilitates a profound analysis of its current state and prospects of defence industry modernization. The identified dynamics and trends of the structural changes in the defence industry complex manifest their synchronism with the changes occurring in the public management structure.
The study is intended for executive and engineering staff of the defence industry complex.
Among the huge amount of books and articles published at the Revolution’s Hundredth anniversary, the author focuses on several volumes translated from English into Russian: Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government”, Mark Steinberg’s “The Russian Revolution. 1905–1921”, and Martin Malia’s “History’s Locomotives.” Comparing the authors’ approaches the author draws conclusions about their scientific and political implications. The books reflect trends in the Slavic studies over the last decades. The main trend in the approach to the Revolution comes from the “cultural turn” — a new focus on everyday life. However, importantly, even the newest books do contain old ideological biases of the times of the Cold War era. This applies mainly to Slezkine’s and Malia’s books, while Steinberg’s research is free from old clichés.
The article analyzes results of political development of post-Communist countries. It looks at various indices and quantitative measurements of modernization, democratization and state capacity, such as Bertelsmann Transformation Index, The Economist Democracy index, etc. This analysis allows the author to assert correlation between success of a country in building market economy and democratization on one hand, and attaining higher state capacity, on the other. The article further proceeds to discuss evolution of political regimes, electoral systems, effects in changes in the regimes and systems, as well as the current phase of development of political parties’ systems. In most cases the article compares and contrasts trends characteristic of respectively eastern and western parts of the post-Communist space. The article also analyzes impact of external (the aspiration to join the European family of nations) and internal factors on the choice of transformation strategies at different phases of post-Communist developement Certain attention is paid to the phenomenon of retraditionalization which is observed both in eastern and western parts of the postcommunist space. The last sub-chapter of the article constitutes a brief case-study which reveals correlation between the level of development and institutional maturity of the political parties’ system and overall progress of a given country in democratization. The author concludes by asserting that the term of “post-Communist countries” did not exhaust its validity to this day for comparative political studies because in most of these countries transformation processes are still underway.