Suchergebnisse

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has been engaged over the past several years in a project to collect and analyze information on the Soviet and East European field. Some of the results of the work to date are presented in this report to the profession.The field of Soviet and East European studies is a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. Not until World War II was there any considerable interest in the region in the United States. At that time, however, the federal government found itself acutely short of specialists on the area and had to scrape a shallow academic barrel. The lack of expertise led to the establishment of new military and civilian training programs; and the changed international situation in the postwar period gave further impetus to the extension of academic programs.

ABSTRACTIn any study of the lives and life styles of people with mental handicaps it is essential to make every effort to obtain the consumers' own perspective of their own social situation and personal circumstances. There is a growing body of literature on the challenges faced by researchers who seek the viewpoint of consumers and some ideas are now emerging about how to meet those challenges most effectively. This paper looks at this growing body of literature, and notes some points of consensus.The paper then describes the research methods used in a follow‐up study of people with mental handicaps living in the community, in which personal views were sought. An attempt is made to describe the challenges met, not only at the design stage but also during the research interviews. Some key issues emerged from the study, and these are discussed in some detail. Illustrative interview material is included to highlight points made about the interaction between researchers and respondents, and to suggest some ways forward for others embarking in this field.

Trends in Sovietology since 1900.

The first (and last) Soviet scholar to survey the history of the Imperial Free Economic Society (Imperatorskoe Vol'noe Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo, or VEO) arrived at the reasonable conclusion that this important organization deserves far greater notice than it has hitherto received. The same is true of the Society's remarkable and remarkably neglected library, barely mentioned even in the same scholar's monograph but preserved almost intact in Leningrad today. The later activities of the Free Economic Society—the oldest (1765-1919) and most influential economic society in Russia—will be pursued elsewhere as part of a broader inquiry, but a brief note on its library is offered here to alert researchers to the potential usefulness of this unique store of economic, social, technical, and statistical materials.

Western and Soviet scholars have generally maintained different interpretations of the period between 1905 and 1917 in Russia, describing it respectively as a time of amelioration or of immiseration for the masses. Both groups, however, have stressed the progress of capitalism in prerevolutionary Russia. Despite standard references to the agrarian problem, most of the attention given to socioeconomic development in this period has focused on industrialization and the urban sector. Yet 87 percent of the population was rural when revolution broke out in 1905, and 85 percent still rural when it erupted again in 1917.During the interrevolutionary period the imperial government adopted a program that was intended to provide a take-off base for agriculture. Prime Minister Stolypin's policy was aimed at the replacement of the archaic communal structure by a new order of individualized peasant landholdings that would give scope to personal initiative and technological innovation.