The Shape of Things to Come: The Russian Federation and the Northern Sea Route in 2011

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Erik Franckx

Abstract The Arctic has recently been catapulted from the back burner of international attention to the forefront of the global agenda. The dissolution of the Soviet Union as well as climate change seem to be responsible for a marked heating up not only of its physical environment, but also of the political tensions concerning the exact legal regime to be applied there. While the universal 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has been accepted by the five Arctic rim countries as the applicable legal framework, on the regional level these same states have tried to ward off possible external interference as much as possible by means of the Ilulissat Declaration of 2008. Shipping has been at the heart of these developments, especially in view of the fact that the year 2007 was characterized by the most extensive summer melt ever since satellite measurements started in 1979, which in turn undoubtedly enhanced the attractiveness of Arctic navigation. It will be argued that the increased interest in promoting Arctic navigation, as evidenced by a thorough analysis of the 2011 shipping season along the Eurasian continent, stands in stark contrast with the applicable Russian legal framework, which in essence dates back to the 1990s, a time when this route had not yet been used for international commercial trade linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (the secrecy still surrounding the icebreaking fees at present being a case in point).

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
S. I. Pukhnarevich ◽  

The article shows the formation of the legal basis for the formation, development and functioning of the system of training and retraining of judicial personnel in the country in the period from 1946 until the end of the USSR. The article also explores the forms and approaches to the organization of improving the quality of the staff of the judicial system. It was concluded that the Soviet Union has formed an ideologically oriented, strictly centralized Federal-Republican system of professional development of court employees.


Polar Record ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Summerhayes ◽  
Peter Beeching

In January-February 1939, a secret German expedition visited Dronning (or Queen) Maud Land, Antarctica, apparently with the intention inter alia of establishing a base there. Between 1943 and 1945 the British launched a secret wartime Antarctic operation, code-named Tabarin. Men from the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS), Britain's covert forces for operating behind the lines, appeared to be involved. In July and August 1945, after the German surrender, two U-boats arrived in Argentina. Had they been to Antarctica to land Nazi treasure or officials? In the southern summer of 1946–1947, the US Navy appeared to ‘invade’ Antarctica using a large force. The operation, code-named Highjump, was classified confidential. In 1958, three nuclear weapons were exploded in the region, as part of another classified US operation, code-named Argus. Given the initial lack of information about these various activities, it is not, perhaps, surprising that some people would connect them to produce a pattern in which governments would be accused of suppressing information about ‘what really happened’, and would use these pieces of information to construct a myth of a large German base existing in Antarctica and of allied efforts to destroy it. Using background knowledge of Antarctica and information concerning these activities that has been published since the early 1940s, it is demonstrated: that the two U-Boats could not have reached Antarctica; that there was no secret wartime German base in Dronning Maud Land; that SAS troops did not attack the alleged German base; that the SAS men in the region at the time had civilian jobs; that Operation Highjump was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica; and that Operation Argus took place over the ocean more than 2000 km north of Dronning Maud Land. Activities that were classified have subsequently been declassified and it is no longer difficult to separate fact from fancy, despite the fact that many find it attractive not to do so.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-298
Author(s):  
Barry Hankins

At times in history, groups of people with very different ideologies have allied with one another because of a common threat. The most striking example of this was the World War II alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union. In a religious matter, Baptists and other free-church evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries joined with deists like Thomas Jefferson to combat the threat to religious liberty posed by the establishment of religion. At other times, groups with similar ideas have been unable to come together because they did not share similar attitudes toward or positions within their cultures. This essay is concerned with the latter phenomenon and uses Southern Baptists and northern evangelicals as a case study. The historical relationship of these two groups illustrates something profound about the very nature of religious alliances; specifically, it illustrates how cultural factors and intuitive notions of uneasiness about theological security determine whether or not religious groups with great theological similarities can find common ground.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minqi Li

Two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the global capitalist economy narrowly escaped total collapse in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009. The world in the twenty-first century has entered into a new era of crisis, which is economic, political and environmental. What will happen between now and the mid-twenty-first century that may shape and largely determine the future of humanity for centuries to come. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution, this article re-evaluates the trajectory of the twentieth century socialism and identifies its legacies. It also considers the unique character of contemporary contradictions and argues that the formation of new industrial working classes may fatally undermine the system’s political legitimacy and raise again the ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels predicted, this time not only in Europe but also in the entire globe.


1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Robert Starr

On October 18, 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union completed the negotiation of a comprehensive series of arrangements covering trade between the two countries. A Trade Agreement, consisting of nine articles and three annexes, and complemented by several exchanges of letters, establishes a new legal framework for the development of US-USSR trade.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 52-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Koivurova

The Arctic was one of the main theatres for strategic military confrontation during the Cold War between the blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. There was no place for multilateral cooperation, other than for very limited issue areas, such as the 1973 Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears between the five states with polar bear populations. Yet, the warming of relations by the end of the Cold War changed all this. Inspired by Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech in 1987, in which the Soviet leader pro-posed various possible areas for Arctic cooperation, differing ideas for international cooperation were advanced. Canadians, in particular, were trying to advance international treaty-based general cooperation for the Arctic, but this never came to pass and it was eventually Finland who was able to broker soft-law collaboration between the Cold War rivals.


1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-532
Author(s):  
Christoph Bluth

RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL IN A STATE OF FLUX. LIKE the other former republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation seeks to come to terms with being an independent state needing to define its national interests and foreign and security policy objectives.The principal element in the new frame of reference for Moscow is the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself. For forty years, most of the territories controlled by Moscow were adjacent to territories protected by the United States, or else to China. The Russian Federation is now virtually surrounded by former Soviet republics, all with deep political, social and economic problems, and some of which are highly unstable and subject to violent civil conflicts. The territory of the Russian Federation itself, about 75 per cent of the territory of the former USSR with about 60 per cent of its population, is still not properly defined, given that significant sections of the borders are purely notional, and the degree of control that Moscow can exercise over the entire Federation is uncertain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 1708
Author(s):  
Malik Rsbaevich MUKANOV ◽  
Ernar Nurlanovich BEGALIEV

The article discusses the current state of the monetary – credit sphere in the former states of the Soviet Union. The authors note that, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led to the defragmentation of the monetary system, is an important event in the formation of the financial sector in Central Asia. The single monetary and financial system, which was adapted to the conditions of the planned economy, had started rapidly falling apart. The result was a break of the traditionally existing economic ties. It is important to note that the monetary policy has a direct impact on the major macro-economic indicators such as GDP, employment and the level of prices. It is thus important to have a solid legal base. The accelerated formation of national monetary systems in Central Asian states has required the creation of genuinely independent emission center as the Central Banks of Central Asia. Since 1994, Central Asian governments have begun to carry out macroeconomic regulation, mutual settlement in the economy and emission activity. The next step was a reform of the banking system in Central Asia. At the beginning of the independence of the Central Asian states a legal framework was created and a transition was made to a two-tier banking system. According to the adopted laws in the countries of Central Asia, a two-tier banking system was formed, where the upper level was represented by the State Bank of the region (with emission rights), and the bottom were - commercial and government specialized. Creating second tier banks was a response to the needs of the Central Asian countries.


October ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Maria Gough

The extraordinary proliferation of political demonstrations around the world over the past several years has reminded us once again of the phenomenal power of the real-time convergence of people in public space, a power to which Diego Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook—a corpus of forty-five small watercolor drawings—bears graphic witness. The sketchbook dates from Rivera's seven- or eight-month sojourn in Moscow, which began in early November 1927 with his direct participation in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution as a delegate to the inaugural internat ional Congress of Friends. Publicly announcing the artist's arrival in Moscow on November 3, the Communist Party's national daily newspaper Pravda discussed his “extraordinary frescoes” in the new Secretar iat of Public Educat ion in Mexico City—which the poet Vladimir Mayakovski had earlier lauded as “the world's first Communist mural”—and went on to explain that, as a revolutionary artist, Rivera now prefers the collective address of “wall painting” over the private easel picture to which he had devoted himself for a decade or so in Paris before 1921. A new venture in Soviet cultural diplomacy, the Congress of Friends had as its objective the forging of a broad, cross-party international alliance of those willing and able to come to the defense of the Soviet Union in their home countries. Rivera, a member of the Mexican Communist Party at the time, participated in the congress at the invitation of the Comintern, which was responsible for hosting notable foreign communists when they were in town and, as such, played a major role in the organization of the three-day meeting. On the first day of the congress the artist was elected—from a pool of 947 delegates—to its Presidium (governing board) and press bureau as a member of the foreign intelligentsia.


1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
David Crowe

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.


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