State Building and Social Obligations in Post-Communist Systems: Assessing Change in Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

* This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 26th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in November, 1994. The research in this paper was funded by a GR-6 grant awarded through the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at Carleton University, which was supported by a general research grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition, I would like to acknowledge Carleton University's Faculty Exchange Program with Moscow State University, which enabled me to travel to Moscow for research on this topic in the spring of 1994. I would like to thank Lisa Semenoff for her research assistance, as well as her insightful comments on the general subject. I am very grateful to Dominique Arel for kindly allowing me access to his copies of published stenographic records of the Ukrainian Supreme Council. I would like to thank Tom Darby for his comments and suggestions. Lawrence Robertson, the discussant on the AAASS panel where an earlier version of this paper was presented in 1994, provided useful comments. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Canadian Slavonic Papers whose constructive and insightful criticisms helped me to improve the paper in the revised version. 1 See Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sarah Michaeljohn Terry, Thinking about Post-Communist Transitions: How Different are They? Slavic Review 52.2 (1993): 333-337. 2 See, for example, Linda J. Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why it Failed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Stephen Crowley, Barriers to Collective Action: Steelworkers and Mutual Dependence in the Former Soviet Union, World Politics 46.4 (1994): 589-615; Thomas F. Remington, ed. Parliaments in Transition: the New Legislative Politics in the Former USSR and Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994); Donna Bahry, Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika, Slavic Review 52.3 (1993): 512-554.