The demise of communism in the Soviet Union could not have occurred without the activism of dissident, anticommunist leaders who created a climate that gave ordinary Russians the courage to stand up to and defeat communist control. But with communism ousted, what new form of government and what new leaders will emerge in Russia, a society that has never known democracy? Michael McFaul, a Western scholar studying at Moscow State University, and Sergei Markov, an assistant professor at Moscow State University, interviewed anticommunist parties in the months preceding and immediately following the August 1991 attempted coup d'etat. To examine the range of the political spectrum in Russia, they also talked to procommunist leaders who emerged to oppose Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, nationalist and anti-Semitic leaders of movements such as Pamyat', labor unions, Christian movements, and organizations opposed to the division of the Soviet Union.

Since 1945 the world has undergone vast and fundamental change. The collapse of colonial empires and the tensions of the Cold War produced great political turbulence in many areasnulland integrative movements in others. Now the end of the Cold War has sparked off the breakdown of one of the superpowers and much turmoil elsewhere.

To chart a way through these dramatic developments, leading scholars from Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australia present up-to-date surveys of the experience of each of the world's eleven geopolitical regions. They also consider the contemporary character of sovereign statehood, looking on the one hand at its enduring geographical and psychological bases and on the other at how it has been affected by economic interdependence and ethnicity. The result is an authoritative survey of the international scene during the second half of the twentieth century.

During the most recent Russian-American summit in Vancouver, Canada in April 1993, President Clinton announced a major new initiative to assist Russia's transition to a market economy. In discussing how to aid the process of Russia's economic reform in ways of mutual benefit to both the United States and Russia, both President Yeltsin and President Clinton underscored the importance of promoting the conversion and privatization of state enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.

While most agree that conversion and privatization of these enterprises are laudable goals, few have discussed concrete methods of achieving these ends at the level of individual enterprises. By focusing on the actual experiences of one Russian enterprise that has both converted to almost 100% civilian production and, at the same time, become a private company, this report seeks to expand the discussion of the means and models for achieving conversion and privatization of the Russian military industrial complex.

This report covers work on conversion and privatization in the former Soviet Union that has been conducted over the past two years by the Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) at Stanford University. In it, we explore the process of conversion and privatization through employee ownership. The report contains one chapter each on the major issues surrounding conversion and privatization, followed by a detailed explanation of the employee ownership method of privatization. The report concludes with the description and analysis of a case study of privatization through employee ownership: the Saratov Aviation Plant.

The war in El Salvador is over. On January 16, 1992, in Mexico Citys ornate Chapultepec Castle the government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the rebel Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) formally signed a comprehensive peace treaty, putting an end to 12 years of conflict.

As 1992 began, the scene of Americas most prolonged military involvement since Vietnam presented images unimaginable just a few months before. In Mexico City, after unexpectedly signing the peace agreement in person, President Cristiani strode across the podium to shake hands with all five FMLN commanders as participants on both sides cried openly. In El Salvador a sea of FMLN flags filled San Salvadors Civic Plaza in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral, where the army once massacred political dissidents; the cathedral itself was draped with an enormous banner of the assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. A ceremony held to observe the commencement of the formal ceasefire was especially poignant: army officers and rebel commanders stood together at attention to sing the Salvadoran anthem on a dais decorated with the flags of El Salvador, the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the FMLN. The rival commandants then accompanied President Cristiani to light an eternal flame in commemoration of the more than 75,000 Salvadorans who died in the tiny countrys war.

In a revolutionary situation in which communism has been discredited and the Communist Party has been labelled a totalitarian organization, 'socialism' is a dirty word in the Soviet Union today. The polarisation between Gorbachev's communist apparat and Boris Yeltsin's new cadres of liberals has left little room for alternative ideas or movements.

Yet a handful of socialists are trying to carve out a third path. Led by Boris Kargalitsky and Mikhail Milutin, the Socialist Party of Russia has concluded that the peoples' interests are not represented by either the old system nor the new liberal agenda. Rather, they seek to build a truly socialist society out of the rubble of stalinism.

We can proudly say that at no time in human history has a political movement and ideological trend played such a tremendous transformative role as the international communist and working class movement.

Leonid Brezhnev (World Marxist Review, 8 (1969), p. 4)

Ironically, Brezhnev's observation still holds true today. However, the transformative power of the international communist movement has resulted not from its consolidation, as Brezhnev surmised, but from its disintegration. The "world revolutionary process" predicted by Marx, initiated by Lenin, and promoted for seventy years by the Soviet Union has come to an abrupt halt. Whether temporary or permanent, its present demise has created one of the most fluid historical moments in the twentieth century.

In Volume 3 of the four-volume Democracy in Developing Countries, the authors follow a common analytical framework to trace the experiences with democratic and authoritarian rule and assess the underlying causes of democratic success and failure in ten Asian countries. Volumes 2 and 4 of the set cover Africa and Latin America. In Volume 1, Professors Diamond, Linz, and Lipset weigh the evidence from these case studies together with a wealth of other theoretical and comparative literature to present a comprehensive theory of the social, cultural, economic, and political factors that foster stable democracy. Eschewing reductionist and monocausal interpretations, they emphasize the interplay between constitutional and party structure, ethnic conflict, socioeconomic change, international constraints, political values and beliefs, and the behaviors, choices, and policies of political leaders. Both the case studies and the theoretical conclusions draw new attention to the relationship between state and society and the autonomy and vitality of social interest groups as important determinants of the democratic prospect.

The book's basic analytic assumption is that there is a distinction between state and society. "Defending the National Interest" shows that the problem for political analysis is how to identify the underlying social structure and the political mechanisms through which particular societal groups determine the government's behavior.

The argument is advanced that the level of university student political activity in a society tends to reflect the degree to which the student social status is developed and formulated as a social type. In societies in which this position is incorporated centrally and is given a great deal of distinctive meaning, political activity will tend to be high. This is particularly true when the student status is normatively incorporated in, regulated by, and given meaning with respect to the national political system. The educational system and the student status tend to be centrally incorporated and highly defined in modern societies because they provide normative and symbolic answers to certain crucial problems which arise in the nation-building process: the justification of the intergration and political authority of citizens and the legitimation and explanation of elite authority. Thus, students tend to be seen in most nations as a peculiarly important corporate constituent of the national society and tend to be more politically active than many other groups. The historically exceptional position of students in the United States and the recent changes toward a more typical level of politicization are considered.