Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1993- “Russia and Eastern Europe”
ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF BAPTISTS AND PENTECOSTALS IN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE
(pp. 3 - 13)
Susan Wiley Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of Geography and Planning
California State University, Chico
Chico, California
Abstract
In the void created by loss of faith in Communism as the dominant ideology, the former Soviet republics are experiencing a religious revival in the early 1990s. Russia and Ukraine, in particular, have become targets for religious conversion by American fundamentalist groups, particularly Pentecostals and Baptists.
Baptists have been well established in the region since the mid-nineteenth century; Pentecostals diffused throughout Russia and Ukraine after 1920. Both groups survived the persecution of the Stalin years, emerging as significant religious groups in the post-glasnost era. Although many thousands have emigrated out of their homeland since Gorbachev's announcement in 1987 that victims of religious persecution were free to leave the Soviet Union, new converts in the early 1990s are more than making up for this loss. Today's efforts by Russian and Ukrainian governmental and educational leaders to attract missionaries from the United States and Europe may be based more on economic and social concerns than religious commitment.
FINANCIAL MARKETS IN RUSSIA: A GEOGRAPHICAL OUTLOOK
(pp. 14 - 20)
Sergey S. Skatershchikov
Chair of Social-Economic Geography
Department of Geography
Moscow State University
Moscow, Russia
NORTH POLE: NEW HOTBED OF TENSION?
(pp. 21 - 25)
Maria L. Spiridonov
Post-Graduate Student
Department of Foreign Geography
Moscow State University
Moscow, Russia
Abstract
The last decades of the twentieth century have been marked by the increasing importance of the circumpolar region, which is becoming a cross-road of global problems. No one of these problems--military, strategic, economic, ecological, cultural, etc.--can be solved by one or even several countries; rather, it demands the participation of the whole world community. From this point of view, working out an international legal regime and a universally recognized mechanism for intergovernmental relations in the Arctic becomes the primary problem. Such a mechanism could become the pattern for intergovernmental relations for the world community in the twenty-first century.
(pp. 26 - 32)
Yuri Chulkov
Department of Law and Economics
Russian People's Friendship University
Moscow, Russia
(pp. 33 - 42)
Lloyd A. Cohen
Department of History and the Russian and East European Center
Boston College
Boston, Massachusetts
Abstract
Amongst the difficulties that confronted the newly independent Balkan states was the highly explosive issue of how to treat their various ethnic minority residents. It became an immense entanglement, especially if some of these minorities were from the former conquering country, their border rivals or those who had no native country of their own but played an active role in their host country's life. These minorities could be and were perceived as a danger to the vital interests and the future development of their homeland. By the late nineteenth century, this issue had evolved into a complex question of legal rights and protection for those foreign ethnic minorities as well as possible foreign intervention into the domestic affairs of the minorities' host state on behalf of that wronged minority. The crux of the question became: Could these nations regulate their foreign minorities as was the right of sovereign states?