Of course we watched it all on television, day by day, as the Evil Empire transmuted into the Circus Bear, but seeing it and knowing what to think about it are not the same. Scholars from eastern and western Europe and North America help out, in 14 papers from an April 1992 conference in Naples.

This work assesses the 'colour revolutions' that took place in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2000 onwards. Apart from exploring political change in the 'coloured revolution' countries themselves, it also focuses on countries that did not experience this executive change but which may otherwise be comparable.

The central subject of Aristotle's ethics is happiness or living well. Most people in his day (as in ours), eager to enjoy life, impressed by worldly success, and fearful of serious loss, believed that happiness depends mainly on fortune in achieving prosperity and avoiding adversity. Aristotle, however, argues that virtuous conduct is the governing factor in living well and attaining happiness. While admitting that neither the blessings not the afflictions of fortune are unimportant, he maintains that the virtuous find life more satisfying than other people do and, with only modest good...

A fresh, authoritative interpretation of Russian politics by a leading authority, this textbook focuses on political developments in the world's largest country under Putin and Medvedev. Using Russian language sources, it covers economic, social and foreign policy, and the 'system' of politics that has developed in recent years. Opposing arguments are presented and students are encouraged to reach their own judgements on key events and issues such as privatisation and corruption. This textbook tackles timely topics such as gender and inequality issues; organised religion; krizis; and Russia's...

The new edition of this market-leading text brings together specially commissioned chapters by a team of top international scholars on the changing politics of this diverse region negotiating the competing pulls of the European Union and post-communist Russia.

The official ideology of Marxism-Leninism is central to Soviet politics and yet its development in recent years has received very little scholarly attention. In this book a group of leading specialists drawn from both sides of the Atlantic advance decisively upon all earlier discussions of this subject to provide both an authoritative and detailed picture of the development of official ideology from the early years up to Gorbachev's 1986 Party Programme, as well as a consideration of the changing role of ideology in Soviet foreign and domestic policy-making. The book will be required reading...

Russia is the world's largest country, and its politics affect the entire international community. Formally, who exercises the power of government is decided, as in Western democracies, by competitive elections that are held at regular intervals. But there have increasingly been doubts about the extent to which Russian parliamentary and presidential elections can be considered `free and fair', and it is the argument of this coauthored study that they are better defined as `authoritarian elections', with a number of distinct characteristics. Using a wide range of sources, including surveys,...

At first, it seemed as if the international financial crisis that broke out in 2008 would have little effect in Russia and the other post-Soviet states. But, by the end of the year, growth was slowing, banks were reluctant to lend, share values had collapsed and unemployment was rising inexorably. The stability of the Putin leadership, it appeared, had been built on the turnaround in economic performance that it had managed to achieve over more than a decade. How would it cope with a sudden reversal? In Ukraine, living standards fell even more sharply. In Belarus, there were fewer obvious...