Reforming the Russian Legal System is a comprehensive analysis of the forces that are shaping legal reform in the former USSR. Looking beneath the flow of day-to-day developments, the book examines how traditional indigenous Russian legal values, and the 74-year experience with communism and "socialist legality" are being combined with Western concepts of justice and due process to forge a new legal consciousness in Russia today. This book is addressed to students, lawyers, and business people interested in the former USSR, as well as scholars of Russian politics and law.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of fifteen independent states on its former territory is one of the most momentous developments of the twentieth century. In From Union to Commonwealth, five leading international scholars--Leokadia Drobizheva and Galina Starovoiteva from Russia, and Gail Lapidus, Ronald Suny and Victor Zaslavsky from North America--team up to examine the forces that lay behind the rise of national movements which challenged, then destroyed, the stability and territorial integrity of the former Soviet state. Writing from their different disciplinary...