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This chapter provides a presentation about Chapter 1 of The Balance of the National Economy, 1923–24, edited by Pavel Illich Popov. The Balance was issued in June 1926 by the Central Statistical Administration (CSU or TsSU) of the USSR, which Popov had headed from July 1918 to January 1926. In the first part of our chapter, we show how Popov’s work on the balance of the national economy was rooted in the specific scientific and political culture of zemstvo statisticians inherited from the Tsar. Statistical inquiry was considered an objective scientific process based on international standards. Furthermore, like zemstvo statisticians, CSU statisticians developed great autonomous political power. The balance of the national economy was built according to these principles, which met harsh criticism from revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. In the second part, we analyze the contents of Popov’s Chapter 1, especially the theoretical foundations of the balance and its connection with Soviet planning. In the third part, we discuss the balance’s significance in the years 1926–1929, years which ended the NEP and launched the first Five-Year Plan, so as to understand how CSU’s balance didn’t become a standard Soviet statistical instrument and was discarded as a “bourgeois” device.

Drawing on the semantic field theory, the paper aims to uncover the challenges of importing and translating a management accounting concept into the Russian language and the semantic nature of resistance towards the imported management accounting concept.

The paper draws on the extensive literature review of the histories of accounting in the Soviet Union and the United States in the first part of the twentieth century and 17 interviews conducted with the Russian accounting academics.

We demonstrate the case of resistance in adopting the imported Anglo-Saxon management accounting concept. We also discuss historical underpinning and origins of this resistance in light of semantic field theory.

The paper calls for more research in the non-Anglo-Saxon contexts problematizing conventional assumptions and beliefs about objectivity and universality of accounting language.

The study demonstrates the importance of understanding historical and cross-cultural developments of accounting language for accounting educators and practitioners. Critical awareness of the differences in semantic fields of accounting can help accounting researchers and educators to develop contextualized research projects and context-relevant teaching practices.

The study contributes to the literature on translations of accounting concepts by demonstrating that accounting concepts are not understood in isolation, instead, they are interpreted in relation to each other. The present study demonstrates that the relationship between the management accounting concept (the signifier) and its meanings (signifieds) is fluid, culturally and historically contingent. To understand this relationship, we should attend to the historical development of semantic fields and associative relations between concepts.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself.

Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s.

Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits.

This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.

The reformist processes of glasnost and perestroika exacerbated an existing crisis in education in the Soviet Union. Although Mikhail Gorbachev′s initiatives did not elicit a strong response among educators before early 1987, they provoked strong discord over the extent of desirable change in national educational policy thereafter. This conflict merged with a wide‐ranging debate over the rewriting of the nation′s history, especially the version to appear in secondary school textbooks. Seizing both issues, classroom teachers and lowlevel administrators made a sustained effort to increase decision‐making authority at the bottom of the educational apparatus, including at the classroom level. By 1989, these differences had settled into a pattern of ongoing, implacable disagreement.

This paper aims to study the Soviet state-owned enterprises that were producing ready to wear clothes, engaged in activities that are traditionally associated with “capitalist” marketing and public relations. Particularly, they responded to consumer complaints, monitored customer satisfaction and changed their product features and offer in response to customer feedback. This claim is illustrated using the example of the garment industry in the city Perm.

The data comes from archival research of a range of sector-wide documents of the Soviet period available in the State Archive of Perm Region and from in-depth interviews with ex-employees of Perm Clothing Design House.

The paper demonstrates the emergence of a marketing system not only in Eastern European countries and in major Soviet cities but also in a provincial closed city of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The findings of the research highlight that the level of sales was important for all the participants in the focal marketing system. Late Soviet marketing had the social function of supporting cooperative relationships between citizens and the state by channeling dissatisfaction and anger through surveys and consumer conferences.

Previous studies undertaken at the top level of the Soviet managerial pyramid have not represented a detailed picture of routine marketing activities during Late Socialism.

The book is a mighty instrument for communication, labor, struggle. It arms a person with life experiences and the toils of humanity. It expands his horizons and gives him knowledge to tame the forces of nature.N.K. Krupskaya, wife of V.I. Lenin

This chapter examines historical developments and current trends in Ukrainian library education, based on a review of the Ukrainian literature, a survey of Library and Information (LIS) curricula, and conversations with senior figures in Ukrainian LIS education. Ukraine became an independent state only in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prior to independence, Ukraine's LIS education was integrated within the Soviet system. After independence the system evolved slowly, but with the recent Orange Revolution, reform efforts have increased apace. Ukrainian LIS education remains more vocational than in the United States, with a two-year nondegree certificate as the most common training, and a four-year bachelor's degree offered by elite institutions. One emerging trend in LIS education there stresses the new opportunities for librarians and information professionals because of Internet technologies. Another trend is part of a more general shift, inspired by a new Ukrainian higher education law, stressing the country's independent culture and formalizing standards for different degrees. Although Ukrainian LIS leaders advocate adoption of open access mechanisms, customer friendly practices, and electronic resources, my own experiences as a library user suggest that Soviet-era habits continue to shape library practices. LIS education has now reached a turning point as reformers grapple with the limited resources, the power of inertia, and remnants of Soviet culture in their efforts to meet current challenges and prepare a new generation of information professionals.

The Soviet experiment on socialism provides several distinguishable politico‐economic models. Employing dialectical methodology, examines the political economy of War Communism (1917‐21) as an exemplar of the “Socialist Command Model”. Explores the economic, political and social forces that were responsible for the emergence of the model, its policies, programmes and consequences, and finally, the forces that made it obsolete for the subsequent stages of Soviet development.

Was the October Revolution inevitable? If yes, what was its real character? If not, could it have been avoided or taken a different course? What was the role played in it by Lenin? Using the dialectical method of analysis, an attempt is made to provide answers to these questions. The following points are stressed: (1) Given the general and particular conditions of Russian life created by the First World War and the February Revolution, the break with the old democratic mixed capitalist form and the establishment of the new totalitarian state capitalist form of the social development were inevitable. (2) The fact that this process was headed by Lenin was accidental and, hence, avoidable. (3) But Lenin individualised the general and particular features of the October Revolution in terms of the names of the events associated with the revolution, of the time of its occurrence, of its participants and of their positions during and after the revolution.

Examines Gorbachev′s (1985‐1991) period of Soviet development as an exemplar of a self‐declared movement towards a more democratic and humane socialism. Gorbachev′s perestroika envisaged a fundamental structural and technological renovation of Soviet economy, reactivation of Soviet persons and attitudes, and overall redirection of the nation′s economic, political and social priorities. Analyses Gorbachev′s model of democratizing socialism with respect to underlying causes or origins, and institutions and policies initiated in the Gorbachev years.

This chapter considers the reception of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire through the music of the Soviet metal band Chernyi Obelisk. It argues that Chernyi Obelisk's four Baudelaire settings, performed in Russian, as part of their early live sets in 1986/1987, offer an important part of the poet's reception history, within the Soviet Union. Taking as a starting point, Michael Robbins's claim that ‘metal and poetry are […] arts of accusation and instruction’, the chapter explores ideas of alienation and of the carnivalesque in Baudelaire's works, as presented through the medium of metal music. Focussing particular on settings of ‘Spleen’ and ‘Une Gravure fantastique’, the chapter contends that Chernyi Obelisk's intertextual and interlingual dialogue with Baudelaire can be read as an aesthetic response to social and political uncertainty during the era of glasnost and perestroika.