When World War 1 broke out, most of the nations in Eastern Europe identified themselves with the existing Empires. Poles were mobilized into the three Empires that divided them. They ran the risk of fighting against each other. Germans in the Russian Empire fought in the Russian army against Germany. As the war progressed, however, they became aware of their ethnic identity. They were discriminated against by the authorities or the populace of the ruling nationality. Or they were manipulated by the belligerent nations against the enemy.

A lot of new states came into being in Eastern Europe after the war in the name of national self-determination. Most of them, however, were not “ethnic states” in the proper sense of the word. They included many citizens of different ethnicity. On the other hand, as a result of the Russian Revolution a state based on the completely new principle came into being: the Soviet Union. It adopted ethnicity as the constituting principle of the state and formed a federation of ethnic republics. Ethnic republics were, however, just on paper. There were no institutional arrangements that would promote citizens’ allegiance to the given republic. The all-mighty Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the institution that should secure citizens’ allegiance to the federal center. So long as the ideological mobilization worked, they managed to succeed in resurrecting citizens’ civic loyalty to the state as a whole.

As the international tension mounted in the course of the 1930s, the Soviet leadership started to look with mistrust on national minorities on the periphery which resulted in the mass murder in Eastern Europe. The famine in 1932–33 in Ukraine was the first case. It was no natural, but man-made disaster to which 3.3 million people fell victim. It was caused by the excessive requisition of grain that the authorities forced through for the ambitious industrialization program. Ukraine had to pay a particularly heavy toll for it. Those who tried to resist were blamed for “Ukrainian nationalism” and “actions to serve the interests of the enemy”. Most of the victims of the so-called “Great Purge” in 1937–38 were citizens of national minorities in Eastern Europe. They were suspected to be spies for Japan in the case of the “Kulak operation” and for Poland in the case of the “Polish operation”. 625,000 people were incriminated and shot to death.

During World War 2 Germans and Soviets did ethnic cleansing in a huge scale in Eastern Europe. Germans considered Eastern Europe as nothing more than suppliers of raw materials, foods and labor forces, and were not interested in integrating peoples there. They starved to death about one million inhabitants of Leningrad and 3.1 million soldiers of the Red Army most of whom were conscripted from Eastern Europe. 5.4 million East European Jews fell victim to the German extermination policy after July 1941. Soviets, on the contrary, were interested in integrating peoples they captured. However, they shot to death most of the elite who cooperated with the previous regime and exiled “enemy nationalities” en masse to Central Asia or Siberia. Beneath the German-Soviet war another ethnic cleansing unfolded: Ukrainian nationalists killed about one hundred thousand Poles and Jews in Volynia.

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The present study demonstrates theoretical significance of system changes in the Soviet/Russian economy under the globalization, and reexamines its research changes. Through the historical evolution and the research development, rich experiences in the Soviet/Russia give us basis for an investigation of the economic system, particularly market and the state.

Russia radically liberalized in transition and its liberalization process synchronized neo-liberal changes of the world after 1970s, which made the contemporary capitalism “normalized” one with the unequal society. In practice, Russia drastically changed its economic system after the transformation in 1992, and a newly built market looked to function completely, based on the liberal economic institutions. The Russian market, however, has shown its specificities strikingly different from the standard model of the developed market. The concepts such as “the emerging market” and “the state capitalism” also testify that Russia has different market structure and different market actors. The Soviet/Russian economy has fluctuated on “the imported growth model” by petroleum and cheap money as well as an economic cycle, which were caused by a long-term Soviet/Russian structure.

Economics of transition in Russia gives clues to analyze the fundamental determinants in the Soviet/Russian economic crisis. The following determinants work in close operation. First of all, in spite of liberal policy measures, the economic growth cannot establish normal markets and cannot improve market quality. Market quality can be defined as a measure of efficiency in allocation and fairness in pricing based on market infrastructure. The Russian market building caused misuse of institutions and rules and it lost the law enforcement. The informal institutions substituted for the formal institutions, and even though they diminished risks and transaction costs under a malfunction of market infrastructure, market quality has got worsened. The state’s strong control over the economic actors also accelerated deterioration of market quality. Secondly, under the strong ideology of neoliberalism, the state excessively retreated from the economy in transition. The state lost the fundamental capability and reliable policy making, and state quality also deteriorated. While the rentier state expanded tax revenues and state assets with a favorable oil price, Russia could not build the efficient tax state. Tax haven and offshore have broken the normal financial flow. The state institutions destabilized and the state changed into the authoritarian regime. Both market and state quality have become risk factors.

The evolution of markets and state are based on geopolitics, international environments, and endogenous socio-economic conditions. The institutional evolution certifies the above market and state barriers. On the one hand, institutions liberalized based on the global standards. On the other hand, the institutions that emerged from the transition did not converge into the “normal”, and follow a path the Soviet/Russia have shaped. The cultural inertia and legacies as a relationship become a determinant of institutional arrangement, and institutions change in ‘path-dependent’ ways. The view on the institutional change certifies continuous evolution of institutions in the Soviet/Russia and difficulties for improving quality of market and state under the politicized regime.

This article examines three books by young Russian scholars on the topic of 1916 Russian-Japanese Alliance aiming to find out what implications their research may have for the present state of relations between Japan and Russia. The books under consideration are: E. Baryshev, The Period of Japanese-Russian Alliance of 1914–1917, The Truth about the ‘Extraordinary Friendship’ (2007); Yu. Pestushko, Japanese-Russian Relations during the First World War (2008) and D. Pavlov, The Forgotten Alliance, Japan and Russia in the Period of 1914–1918 (2014). One common feature of their research is the wide use of Russian and Japanese original sources, which sets their research apart from ideological inclinations usually characteristic to historical studies in the Soviet period.

Though the three authors concentrate on analysis of the same political process, they are different in accents the authors make and in what they add to the central topic of their books. For Baryshev, the rapprochement was supported by what he calls the “civilizational similarity” of the two countries, which were both latecomers in modernization and thus felt themselves antagonistic to the Anglo-Saxon world. His research may, indeed, be qualified not only as a history of diplomacy, but also of the social and political thought. Pestushko conducted a thorough study of political and economic processes emphasizing the difficulties of negotiations between Japan and Russia and highlighting the importance of the territorial issue, i.e. the transfer of the southern branch of the East Chinese Railway from Russia to Japan. Though the issue was not resolved to Japan’s entire satisfaction, this did not prevent the signing of the treaty because other considerations prevailed. Pavlov describes in details the process of weapons supply by Japan to Russia calling it the core of Russian-Japanese rapprochement. This article argues against such an assessment, because, though Russian money helped modernize the Japanese military industry, the establishing of zones of influence in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia was the priority for each negotiating party. Pestushko and Baryshev reject the previously dominant assessment of the 1916 Alliance as the anti-German one suggesting its anti-American nature. However, it may be more right to say that while for Russia it was anti-German, Japan saw the United States as the main threat to its interests in China.

The article also examines how the rapprochement influenced mutual Russian-Japanese images. It reviews the case of the writer Vas. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko who in 1916 had to make corrections to his book written in 1908 concerning the assessment of Russian-Japanese relations. The article brings to attention letters written by young Japanese to their Russian friends, which were published in Kokumin Shinbun in 1916.

On the whole, though the period of rapprochement was not long and ended with the 1917 revolution in Russia and Japanese intrusion into Siberia, the attention paid to it by Russian scholars is indicative of the trend towards seeing the relations between the two countries in a positive perspective. The three books demonstrate that in spite of many frictions and frequent differences in vision Japan and Russia are able to overcome them.

Yury Olesha completed Envy, his first novel, after repeated trial and error in terms of the form of narrative. The novel consists of two parts, with a change in the narrator from Nikolai Kavalerov, the hero, in the first part to the author in the second. However, it is not clear why Olesha changed the form of narrative and the narrator in the second part of Envy. Upon inspection of the book’s previous drafts, it becomes apparent that Olesha tried various forms of narrative in the process of writing. This study attempts to clarify the reason of change in the form of narrative in the published version, judging from the reason of change in the form of narrative in the drafts.

From multiple types of drafts, this study picked up three groups of drafts that were written in the three different stages of writing. The fragmental chapter “Useless Things” can be regarded as the first stage, in which the hero is not Kavalerov but Ivan Babichev, one of the main characters in the final draft. In “Useless Things,” Olesha introduces Zvezdarov as a narrator and gradually gives him a personality as powerful as that of Ivan Babichev. As a result, the former becomes as important as the latter.

However, it seems that Olesha still wanted to present Ivan Babichev as the hero. Therefore, in the second stage, Olesha moves from Zvezdarov to Kavalerov as a neutral narrator to recount Ivan Babichev’s story. Nevertheless, Kavalerov is also gradually given a powerful personality, becoming as important as Ivan Babichev.

This may account for Olesha making Kavalerov the hero in the third stage. Instead of Kavalerov, the author begins to use Kavalerov’s neighbor as the narrator. The notable feature of this stage is the relationships of pairs: Kavalerov/Ivan and Kavalerov/his neighbor. Although Olesha ultimately shifted the focus from Ivan Babichev to Kavalerov as a hero in the novel, it appears that he continued to believe the former to be more suitable for the role. Thus, in this stage, Olesha adorns Kavalerov with many features characteristic of Ivan in the previous stage. At the same time, Olesha now found Kavalerov’s personality suited to that of a narrator. Therefore, the author initially made the narrator, Kavalerov’s neighbor, a literary mirror of Kavalerov, as a hero. However, in the end, the author presents Kavalerov with characteristics separate from Ivan, abandons the use of the neighbor as a narrator, and makes Kavalerov both the hero and the narrator. This decision was adopted in the final version as well.

The reason for change in the form of narrative and the narrator in the second part of Envy is revealed in the relationship between the hero and the narrator in the earlier drafts. In the second part of the published version, Ivan Babichev’s monologue is of great significance. In other words, Ivan Babichev becomes as important as the hero. As we saw above, Olesha knew that Kavalerov was not a suitable narrator for Ivan’s story. Perhaps this is why Olesha abandoned the use of Kavalerov as the narrator in the second part of the novel. In Envy, the problem of who is the narrator of the story is as important as the problem of who is the hero of the story.

This article is devoted to examining the formation of Soviet bioethics since the 1970s by focusing on the activities and viewpoints of Ivan Frolov, who played a prominent role in laying the ground-work for this interdisciplinary study, and who would later become an adviser to the General Secretary of the CPSU in the Gorbachev era. In doing so, this paper aims to demonstrate the differences between the Soviet bioethics and that of the Western school of thought, as well as to identify the shortcomings of Frolov’s attempt to establish the field in the USSR.

Soon after Trofim Lysenko’s group lost its power in the Soviet academic community in 1964, not only the field of genetics but also eugenics were resurrected with a new look supported by leading-edge molecular biological and genetic engineering; which had hitherto been developed mainly in the West. In 1970, the Soviet journal “Questions of Philosophy” held a round-table discussion chaired by Frolov with the title “Human Genetics, and its Philosophical, Social-Ethical Problems”. There an embryologist, a general geneticist, a demographer, as well as an ethicist and philosophers argued over the social-ethical aspects of science, especially in regard to gene manipulation and neo-eugenics. Today this round-table is regarded as the main origin of the Soviet, —and later— Russian bioethics. Since the 1970s, influenced by a global trend towards regulating recombinant DNA experiments, and opposition to human enhancement, Frolov published his works. These introduced the new world currents in genetic engineering and neo-eugenics; criticised human enhancement from the Marxist paradigm of the “new human”, whose personality must be developed all-roundly; supported the Western scholars, who were struggling against neo-eugenics; and appealed for the necessity of an international approach to controlling biology and genetics.

At the same time, the Soviet bio-philosopher developed networks of contacts within UNESCO alongside US bioethics institutes, and gave presentations on the socio-ethical aspects of genome science for those foreign associates. Since the middle of the 1980s until the 1990s, Frolov made attempts to get Soviet bioethics recognised by his Western counterparts, by forming a panel of experts engaged in bioethics in various areas. As a result, Soviet bioethics, based on talks among biologists, doctors, philosophers, lawyers, in addition to an Orthodox priest, was established at the end of 1980s. In April of 1991, the Soviet national bioethics committee was established in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the wake of Frolov’s appeal to the Presidium. In May, the International Meeting on Bioethics and the Social Consequences of Biomedical Research was held in Moscow under the auspices of UNESCO.

Therefore, it is indeed clear that Frolov contributed to the foundation of bioethics in the Soviet academic community, but he failed in his moral obligation to develop an interest in bioethics amongst the general public, and to involve them in the debate, whereas in the West national debates centring on bioethics had been flourishing since the 1970s. The result of Frolov’s ignorance was evident in a 1993 survey, which demonstrated broad support for neo-eugenic treatments by the Russian populace. Now Boris Yudin, Frolov’s successor, highlights the importance of familiarising oneself with this theme and inspiring popular debate on the topic through mass media and education.

Poland has shown strong economic growth for 20 years since 1995, and is also the only EU country that achieved positive GDP growth in 2009 during the global recession.

Several studies have looked at the causes of this good economic performance, and attribute it to such as the effective utilization of EU Funds, stimulus by macroeconomic policy, devaluation of Polish currency, prudential control or regulation in the financial system and so forth.

Poland is a country well favored with foreign aid both before and after its accession to the EU from international institutions including the EU. When the focus is given to EU Funds after joining the EU on May 1, 2004, it is easy to understand that such funds play an important role as key driver of economic growth in Poland.

Poland enjoys a comparatively big allocation of EU Funds, indeed it was the top recipient of funds when the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) was in effect (2007–2013). The financial transfer of EU Funds is 3.7 times greater than the Polish contribution to the EU, and this amounts to 4% of Polish overall GDP (3% by Structural Fund and 1% by Common Agricultural Policy (so called CAP)) according to 2013 statistics. Furthermore the ratio of EU Funds to the governmental budget is 10-20%. The G20 members at the London Summit 2009 agreed to a financial stimulus of around 3% of GDP to mitigate the global recession. Thus the 4% of GDP from EU Funds should contribute greatly to Polish GDP growth.

EU funds can be classified by 2 main categories, one is Structural Funds and the other is CAP payments mentioned above. Structural Funds are used to support the modernization of infrastructures by member states or between member states. Therefore it can be utilized as fiscal investment to promote GDP growth. Most CAP payments are allocated to farmers as direct-aid payments, which may result in an expansion of domestic demand (as household consumption). In fact, GDP ratio of the construction industry in Poland is 2% higher than in other EU member states, and the consumption propensity is also 5% higher.

EU Funds are costless financial grants from the EU without any fiscal burden falling on the Polish government. Hence there is no serious concern about crowding-out in the financial market, nor about rising interest rates of government bonds. EU Funds are, therefore, a very effective tool for Polish authorities to control economic growth. As they fully understand its function and importance in their national economy, Poland had tried as much allocation of EU Funds as possible under the current MFF regime.

In the recent economic forecast by the EU, Poland is expected to continue its good economic performance in the coming years mainly due to robust domestic demand. But there is fear that the Polish economy may fall into the Middle-income trap over the long-term, if they continue to depend on EU Funds for the progress of their economy.