The struggle of Belorussian Jews for the restitution of possessions and housing in the first Postwar decade

Illusions About the Soviet Position in the Middle East. Amnon Sella, Soviet Political and Military Conduct in the Middle East. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981. xiii + 211pp. Maps. Tables. Bibl. Appendices. Name Index. Subject Index. £15.00.

A Valuable Piece of Scholarship. Yaacov Ro'i, Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980. 540pp.

Yugoslav Jewry in World War II. Jasa Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945. Zrtve genocida ucesnici narodnooslobodilackog rata (Jews of Yugoslavia 1941–1945. Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters*). Belgrade: Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, 1980. 590 pp. Tables. Bibl. Name Index. English Summary.

Antisemitism of a Great Writer. David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980. iv + 231pp. Index. (University of Texas Press Series 3). $17.50, £12.20.

A Tortured Perspective: A Russified Liberal and the Jewish Predicament. O. O. Gruzenberg. Yesterday: Memoirs of a Russian‐Jewish Lawyer. (Edited and with an Introduction by Don C. Rawson. (Tr. from the Russian by Don C. Rawson and Tatiana Tipton). Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1981. xxix‐t‐ 235pp. Map. Chart of Court and Law Enforcement System. Glossary of Names. Bibl. Index. $27.50. £19.25.

On the Eve of Babi Yar. Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, Di Nakht Erev Babi Yar. Drame (The Night Before Babi Yar. A Drama). (Translated from the Russian by Note Lurye). Moscow: Sovetish Heymland, no. 9, pp. 16–56.     

Child mortality, fertility, and human capital accumulation

This article analyzes the impact of decline in child mortality on fertility and economic growth. The study shows that the timing of mortality relative to education is crucial to implications of mortality decline. If child mortality is realized before education starts, an exogenous decline in child mortality leads to a decline in education—a finding that is opposite to those of studies that considered a decline in mortality after the cost of education has been incurred. The work also demonstrates the role of parental human capital in reducing child mortality and the causal link between rising education and declining child mortality.

The response of violent mortality to economic crisis in Russia

From 1992 to 1994 life expectancy for Russian males dropped from 62.0 to 57.6 years. Female life expectancy dropped from 73.8 years to 71.2 years. This drop in life expectancy coincided in time with the introduction of painful economic reforms in Russia, leading to a rapid decrease in real wages and pensions, nearly complete loss of personal savings, and a tremendous increase in the poverty rate. This article examines the temporary changes in mortality for violent causes of death during the crisis period with a special emphasis on age-specific and gender-specific differences in the response to economic crisis.     

The Queue

Queues, large and small, have long been an identifying feature of our reality, an indelible attribute of our way of life. For many years, if not decades, they were almost unnoticed, and were considered as a self-evident phenomenon in a sense, disagreeable but inevitable, and not deserving of any special study. Only statistics dispassionately noted the loss of free time owing to queues, explaining them by the unsatisfactory organization of services, the lack of sufficient space for sales, and shortages of goods. But the ordinary buyer judges not only the quality of work of commercial enterprises, but also the effectiveness of social policy by the presence or absence of queues, the range of goods on the shelves, and the availability of goods and services. Public opinion about the results and the course of perestroika is formed in queues. Here are some typical statements from questionnaires and letters received by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion of the Institute of Sociology, USSR Academy of Sciences, and the weekly Sobesednik in connection with a study conducted on the problem of queues and shortages. "However much talk has gone on about changes, until queues have disappeared, we will be humiliated, insulted, or even simply deceived" (anonymous respondent, signing himself as "a buyer for whom there is nothing to buy"). "Queues are a national disgrace" (V. B., a research worker in Tartu). "Queues are the disgrace of our leaders" (a navigation officer in Kuibyshev).     

Jews in Belorussia's judicial system, 1944–1953

The relationship and cultural transfer between Jews and Belorussians are still rather unexplored topics. This article aims at analysing a historical process neglected by the historians of both the Jewish people and the Soviet Union: the “Belorussianisation” of the Jewish people in the interwar period. It proposes to scrutinise the impact of the nationalities policy on the crystallisation of a Belorussian‐Jewish identity. On the one hand, it is obvious that Belorussian leading political figures, influenced by Jewish intellectuals, proved to be very favourable to the development of the Jewish culture and to a Jewish‐Belorussian rapprochement. On the other hand, this study suggests that the achievements of the Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the “Belorussianisation” of Jews were ambiguous. In the three fields studied – education, scholarship and art – the results appeared to be mitigated and paradoxical. The “indigenisation” policy led to a separation of the Jewish and Belorussian educational system but stimulated the flourishing of a joined Belorussian‐Jewish scholarship. In contrast, the most profound and fruitful encounter between the Jewish and Belorussian cultures occurred in a domain, the visual arts, where the Belorussian government did not set a clear policy of rapprochement.     

The Pussy Riot Case

The performance put on by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (CCS) in Moscow is rightly considered a major event in the international protest movement of 2012. The Pussy Riot case became a litmus test for liberalism and for the schisms in Russian society, raising a wave of irreconcilable criticism from the radically inclined pro-Putin majority, including politicians, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and journalists. A central theme in the criticism directed against Pussy Riot was anti-Western rhetoric. Asserting that the West supported Pussy Riot's actions, the critics portrayed the performance as an attack on the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russian statehood. In the ideological components of the anti-Western campaign against this punk group, a parallel emerges between the Pussy Riot case and the Beilis trial held a hundred years earlier in terms of social antagonism and the appraisal of liberal values. Whereas Beilis's acquittal on the eve of World War I marked a tendency toward the establishment of democracy in Russia at that time, the conviction in the Pussy Riot case was a triumph for antidemocratic and anti-Western values, showing that contemporary Russia has completed its transition to an authoritarian regime.     

The quest for a general theory of aging and longevity

Extensive studies of phenomena related to aging have produced many diverse findings, which require a general theoretical framework to be organized into a comprehensive body of knowledge. As demonstrated by the success of evolutionary theories of aging, quite general theoretical considerations can be very useful when applied to research on aging. In this theoretical study, we attempt to gain insight into aging by applying a general theory of systems failure known as reliability theory. Considerations of this theory lead to the following conclusions: (i) Redundancy is a concept of crucial importance for understanding aging, particularly the systemic nature of aging. Systems that are redundant in numbers of irreplaceable elements deteriorate (that is, age) over time, even if they are built of elements that do not themselves age. (ii) An apparent aging rate or expression of aging is higher for systems that have higher levels of redundancy. (iii) Redundancy exhaustion over the life course explains a number of observations about mortality, including mortality convergence at later life (when death rates are becoming relatively similar at advanced ages for different populations of the same species) as well as late-life mortality deceleration, leveling off, and mortality plateaus. (iv) Living organisms apparently contain a high load of initial damage from the early stages of development, and therefore their life span and aging patterns may be sensitive to early-life conditions that determine this initial damage load. Thus, the reliability theory provides a parsimonious explanation for many important aging-related phenomena and suggests a number of interesting testable predictions. We therefore suggest adding the reliability theory to the arsenal of methodological approaches applied to research on aging.