Hoover Institution Press Publication

"Alexandra Andreevna Voronine and her mother lived in Kharkov alone, destitute, and fearing for their lives because of World War I, revolution, civil war, and famine. When Alexandra went to work in 1921 at the office that was coordinating Russian and foreign famine relief, she met Captain Vidkun Quisling, Fridtjof Nansen's representative in the Ukraine. In 1922, at the age of seventeen, she married the man whose name became synonymous with traitor during World War II and accompanied him to Oslo." "Abandoned in Paris within a year, penniless and unaware of being a pawn in a game of international intrigue, Alexandra remained under Quisling's strict control for several more years. When her tumultuous life eventually took her to China, she married W. George Yourieff, who supported her efforts to recall and analyze her years as Quisling's wife. A further tide of events saw the Yourieffs settled in California, and in 1980 they began a collaboration with the Norwegian-born historian and novelist Kirsten A. Seaver. The archives Seaver consulted in London and Oslo and at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University confirmed Alexandra's intensely personal, episodic recollections about an extraordinary life and provided the necessary connective tissue. They also revealed to Alexandra at long last the brutal story behind her lost years."--BOOK JACKET.

"In six chapters, Terry Anderson and Laura Huggins make a powerful argument for free market environmentalism. They break down liberal and conservative stereotypes of what it means to be an environmentalist and show that, by forming local coalitions around market principles, stereotypes can be replaced by pragmatic solutions that improve environmental quality without increasing red tape."--BOOK JACKET.

The author examines in detail the issues most critical to the region's future. He describes oil as the current, most important export to the outside world from the Middle East but warns that technology will eventually make it obsolete, leaving those who depend solely on oil revenues with a bleak future. The three factors that could most help transform the Middle East, according to Lewis, are Turkey, Israel, and women. He also argues that there is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true sense of that word and to achieve the social, cultural, and scientific changes necessary to bring the Middle East into line with the developed countries of both West and East.

xvii, 239 pages : 23 cm

"Thoughts on issues of character, leadership, integrity, personal and public virtue, and ethics, the selections in this volume converge around the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity--lessons just as valid for the challenges of present-day life as they were for the author's Vietnam experience." --Publisher's Website.

Contains previously published essays.

The contributions to this volume demonstrate how the principles of fiscal responsibility and individual accountability that have been applied to economic and social policies - essentially free market principles - can be applied successfully to environmental policy. The authors offer ten commonsense reforms as a starting point, all based on the compelling arguments that a new system of positive incentives can get us more environmental quality at lower cost. These reforms include land lease programs for nontraditional commodity production, long-term transferable land permits, landowner compensation for regulated endangered species property, and performance-based (as opposed to technology-based) water and air pollution laws.

The demise of communism in the Soviet Union could not have occurred without the activism of dissident, anticommunist leaders who created and nourished a climate in which ordinary Russians gained 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 research associate at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, and Sergei Markov, an assistant professor at Moscow State University, interviewed anti-communist leaders and collected the documents of 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. What emerges is a kaleidoscope of leaders with distinct ideas on key issues facing Russia: how to reform the economy, what role the market should play in a new economic system, how to respond to growing demands from non-Russian republics for independence, what leaders can be trusted, what Russia's relations with the West should be, and what form of government would be best for Russia. Gathered here are essays offering historical background on the parties, selected interviews with prominent members of these groups, and important party documents. Whether democracy will flourish in Russia remains in question. The parties profiled here, actively involved in the debate over Russia's future, offer readers an insider's look into contemporary Russian politics.

In this latest collection of his always provocative essays, Thomas Sowell once again demonstrates why he is one of the most thoughtful, readable, and controversial thinkers of our time. With his usual unrelenting candor, Sowell cuts through the stereotypes, popular mythology, and "mush" surrounding the critical issues facing our nation today. Combining reason and common sense with actual historical and statistical evidence, he challenges the assumptions of those cultural and political elites he calls "the anointed" - those who are "presuming or pretending to know answers that could be applied through government programs" - and offers a hard-hitting perspective that is uniquely his own.

How did Boris Yeltsin - judged by most analysts and politicians the obvious underdog going into the 1996 Russian presidential election - emerge as the clear winner? Was Yeltsin's landslide reelection as free and fair as it appeared? In June 1996, for the first time in a thousand years, Russian citizens were given the chance to select their head of state in a democratic election. Yet the reformist incumbent, Boris Yeltsin, seemed poised for certain defeat at the hands of the Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov; six months earlier, in parliamentary elections, Russian voters resoundingly rejected proreformist candidates in favor of those from the Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Michael McFaul Analyzes three major factors that combine to explain why Yeltsin's victory should have been expected, namely, the "revolutionary" nature of the electorate's choices, polarizing and consolidating effects of the presidential election itself, and the superior, modern campaign strategy of Boris Yeltsin. In addition to the analysis, McFaul offers possible scenarios for Russia's next presidential election, as well as the potential future of democratic consolidation in Russia.