With the threads of Soviet polity and economy unraveling, a group of Politburo elites decided to restore order with an attempted putsch in August 1991. Media control was total. Ukraine is governed today by a parliamentary system, with a national parliament of 450 deputies (the Verkhovna Rada); a president who serves as head of state and chief executive; a Cabinet of Ministers, led by a prime minister who is appointed by the president and confirmed by parliament; and a Constitutional Court. Gorbachev was clearly sympathetic to environmental concerns, as evidenced by his formation of Green Cross International following his resignation from the Soviet presidency. This began to change in the late 1920s, when Stalin came to power. In 1989, the Soviets abandoned official censorship. In the Soviet hierarchy, Ukraine was both a subordinate state and a national republic where nationalist sentiments had to be tightly controlled. This erosion of public confidence accelerated the process of political disintegration. In 1987, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev announced his plans for _____, or a restructuring of the Soviet economy and government. Predictions about the demise of the family also ceased. In the Soviet context political measures proved inadequate; a thorough overhaul of the Soviet administrative structure was needed before an effective environmental policy could be realized.

The media policy of glasnost, or openness, struck at the Soviet policy of official censorship, and the most famous journalist of the period was a Ukrainian, Vitaly Korotich, editor of the Moscow weekly Ogonyok. When Khrushchev came to power and launched his destalinization program, the woman question was partially reopened once again. This system has evolved from being heavily legislative centered to being dominated by the president, who until 2000 had the power to make laws by decree. Women were assured that State institutions would take over their domestic tasks. ScienceDirect is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. ScienceDirect is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. Soviet Union 19291991, Status of Media in, Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Russian and Post-Soviet Studies: Environment, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Russian and Post-Soviet Studies: Politics, Freedom of the Press in the Former Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Russia shared 70 years of the same media, and although they went through similar developmental periods, the Ukrainian mass media were always less free than their Russian counterparts. The notion that women's sense of self-fulfillment rested on their combining the traditionally female roles in the family with the traditionally male roles in politics and social production began to be questioned, largely because of the seemingly intractable demographic implications: the birthrate, at least in the European republics of the Soviet Union, had remained stubbornly low. When Kuchma leaves office in 2004, a raft of criminal proceedings are expected to follow him, although whether they do will depend in part on the composition of the Verkhovna Rada, where in March 2002 national elections gave Kuchma's political coalition a narrow margin of control. The new agency faced the monumental challenge of formulating and implementing policy in theincreasingly chaotic political climate. Journalists' rights are only partly protected in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. Environmental activism laid the foundation for nationalist activism, which in turn fragmented the country into 15 separate states. In January 1988 the Soviet leadership created a State Committee on Nature Protection (Goskompriroda), the first all-union government agency tasked exclusively with monitoring and regulating environmental protection. In contrast, the Tigers and some neighbors in Asia demonstrated remarkable economic growth, which led eventually to a loosening of authoritarian political controls. In the Soviet Union prior to 1986, the media were an instrument of Communist Party policy and served mostly to meet political and ideological needs; they were never part of the economic system. The figures for 1998, according to a media watchdog group, the Glasnost Defense Foundation, were 11 journalists killed in Russia (down from 15 in 1997) and 60 attacks against journalists (throughout the former Soviet Union). Reducing tensions was a start but would not fundamentally improve. In the Soviet hierarchy, Ukraine was both a subordinate state and a national republic where nationalist sentiments had to be tightly controlled. All workers were now needed, women as well as men, and by 1932 the number of women workers was almost double what it had been in 1928.

Is there a single pattern that applies universally, especially during the tumultuous decades from the collapse of colonialism to the collapse of communism, the only period available for study? Women could now be withdrawn from the workforce, and this could result in two positive outcomes: an increase in the birthrate, and a reduction in the unemployment figure. This extended even to the Communist Party's own theoretical journal, Kommunist, in which three female scholars from the Institute of Socio-Economic Problems challenged what they saw as a clear trend to improve economic performance by shedding the less effective elements of the work force: and that means, in the first place, women. This, they argued, lay behind the introduction of what seemed to be new benefits for women: In order to facilitate this female exodus from social production, it has been suggested that they be granted a series of privileges which will result in the reduction of their work load: the work day will be shortened, the period of paid leave to look after a new-born baby lengthened, and so on (Zakharova et al. Robert L. Stevenson, in Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, 2003. For development specialists during the 21st century, the question is whether both couldand shouldbe pushed simultaneously or, if not, which should be given priority. Nevada-Semipalatinsk lobbied Alma Ata and Moscow and in 1990 secured an indefinite moratorium on nuclear testing.

Iurii Andropov, former head of the KBG(and thus privy to information about the real state of social problems), succeeded Brezhnev as General Secretary (198284) and implemented reforms to increase labor and social discipline. 2003-2022 Chegg Inc. All rights reserved. There was also no question of them choosing not to have children. At a time when the West was promoting and preserving separate male and female spheres, Soviet propagandists were urging women to leave that female bastion, the home, and enter the public world of work and politics, until then a largely male environment. Articles on the organization of communes made it clear that women would still be responsible for the cooking, laundry, child care, etc., but they would now take on this work collectively, for the commune as a whole, rather than individually, for their own families. The press on the whole continued to applaud the country's successful establishment of women's equality, but some authors now acknowledged that the real situation was more complex, and that women fell behind men in both professional and political hierarchies. From 1995 to the start of the 21st century, Russian journalists were regularly held in police detention, prosecuted on criminal charges for their investigative reporting, physically attacked (by police, anonymous bombs, or unknown assailants), kidnapped (in areas of unrest such as Chechnya), and occasionally murdered.

Environmental activism peaked toward the end of the Soviet period as Chernobyl and revelations about the extent of environmental degradation exposed the government's incompetence and disregard for the people's well-being. the main purpose of the tax cuts reagan supported was to: According to the theory of supply-side economics, _____ is the first step toward creating a healthy economy. In 1988, Armenians in Karabakh began demonstrating for unification with the Armenian Republic, which the Azerbaijani leadership refused.

From the 1970s, with Brezhnev now in charge, there was another shift in policy. This article will not only examine legal and constitutional provisions relating to freedom of the press, but will also consider how official bodies enforce laws relating to the media as well as informal practices that affect the viability of non-state media. The experience of the final years of the 20th century offers a mixed assessment. Some countries are in essence dictatorships, some provide only limited political freedoms to their citizens, and the three Baltic statesEstonia, Latvia, and Lithuaniaare democracies headed toward accession to the European Union. Instead, they would see raising a family as their main source of satisfaction. Far from being an outdated institution that had no place in a communist society, the family assumed a new significance. Within two years of this article appearing its authors had founded the Centre for Gender Studies in Moscow and, as well as publishing material hitherto unimaginable in the Soviet Union, were mounting university courses and hosting conferences on gender issues in Soviet society. Widespread unemployment in the 1920s meant that few women were actually drawn into social production. The first Five-Year Plan had produced an enormous social upheaval, one of the results of which was an alarming drop in the birthrate, and it was hoped that rehabilitating the family might help reverse this trend.

Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, saw journalism as an instrument of state, whose various media channels should send messages to control and convince the masses of the wisdom of the Communist Party and the wonders of the Soviet state. Charles E. Ziegler, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015. Until Gorbachev broke the mold, national security affairs reporting in his country, and in all the other Communist and totalitarian states, consisted of stories about the skills and successes of fighting forces and the wonders of new military technologieslong after they are deployed to military units. Two words from the final days of the Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika, were often invoked to describe the dilemmas for government planners. The combination of electoral liberalization and glasnost ultimately encouraged the force that would tear the USSR apart: ethnic sentiments and conflict. Foreign direct investment in the country is among the lowest in the region. We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. While many of these were initiallyorganized clandestinely by the KGB to co-opt and control ethnic sentiments, eventually local leaders began to actautonomously: Gorbachev's reforms were weakening Moscow's grip on the country, and officials and elites at all levels now saw the opportunity to make bids for power. The willingness of the regime to countenance the destruction of huge tracts of land, the poisoning of the air and water, and the waste of valuable natural resources, while covering up the effects of environmental degradation on the population, exposed the fundamental inhumanity of the communist system. By 1991, the three Baltic republics were calling for independence, and there were public calls for renegotiating the relations between the republics and the basis of the entire USSR. In union republic elections in 1990 environmental issues proved equally important to voters and candidates. During perestroika (19861991), the media were central to economic liberalization, becoming both a tool and (ultimately) an object of the process. In addition to setting and monitoring pollution norms, Goskompriroda was empowered to conduct environmental impact studies and to develop a comprehensive program for cleaning up the environment and planning a more environmentally benign economic strategy. Environmental protection in the final years of the Soviet Union reflected the general devolution of authority and chaos that characterized the newly independent postcommunist states of the 1990s. In its brief experience with independence, the country has had nine prime ministers. Ziegler, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. Among those elites, the most powerful are from the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, formerly home to the Soviet space industry and now the home base of President Leonid Kuchma and his political rival, former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Further, the explosion of the American space shuttle Challenger and the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1985 drove home to Gorbachev and allies that the status quo could not continue. Gorbachev's goal was not to dismantle the Soviet Union, but to strengthen it; however, glasnost produced dramatic changes in Soviet media and the end of one-party domination. Chernobyl heightened public awareness of the dangers to health from various forms of pollution, and in the relaxed political atmosphere of the late 1980s a large number of informal ecology groups were organized. Laura Belin, in Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, 2003. The woman question was declared solved. In addition, 43 journalists were under investigation by prosecutors and 7 remained under arrest. At the same time, the pledge to free women from their traditional domestic duties was quietly abandoned. This meant that they would continue to work, but would devote less time and energy to trying to improve their qualifications and climb the professional ladder. The first was glasnost (openness), political reform aimed at reducing censorship and freeing up public discourse, in hopes that public criticisms would force state bureaucrats and conservative elites to reduce their resistance to change. Kuchma is Ukraine's second chief executive since independence, having been elected to one five-year term in 1994 and a second in 1999. The result was a patchwork of fees and regulations imposed without clear reference to costs and benefits and implemented in the context of an acute economic crisis. Glasnost (openness, often linked to freedom of speech and freedom of the press) and perestroika (economic reform) combined the two elements of development emphasized by Lerner and Schramm. Instead, there was an attempt to alter the balance between work and family in their lives, to persuade them to see the family as paramount and work as secondary. Furthermore, the family now took on a symbolic function; Soviet society as a whole was depicted as one large family, with Stalin the ultimate patriarch. Domestically, reports of plane, train, or other major accidents, natural disasters, or political setbacks were never to be reported. While the leaders of this coup were able to take Gorbachev into custody, Yeltsin remained free in Moscow to publicly mobilize the crowds gathering to defend the reformers. Moreover, Moscow invested heavily in its own mediaits publishing houses and broadcasting facilitieswhile providing far less for the production of media in other national republics or even in other regions of Russia itself. As well, managers and workers took the new-found autonomy of perestroika and expanded private production, but increasingly at the expense of production for the state and in the name of speculative profit rather than adding value, managers would obtain deficit goods (whether raw materials or other goods) atcheap rates from the state and resell them at higher prices toother managers who needed these goods. In addition, more critical discussion of political issues would help to undermine those opposed to Gorbachev and his political and economic policies. The familiarity of traditional family life might also provide some stability in people's lives in the face of such radical change. After a year with Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary (198485) a sop to the Brezhnev generation Gorbachev was elected to take the late Chernenko's position. Moreover, Moscow invested heavily in its own mediaits publishing houses and broadcasting facilitieswhile providing far less for the production of media in other national republics or even in other regions of Russia itself. During perestroika (19861991), the media were central to economic liberalization, becoming both a tool and (ultimately) an object of the process. Paradoxically, the Communist Party's monopoly on political authority ultimately generated both conservative and reform forces: those who gained from the existing system or were ideologically invested in it made up conservatives, but those who desired reform could also find patrons in the Party, so long as they were quiet about desires for reform and bided their time (Cohen, 1979). John J. Schulz, in Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, 2003.

Soviet central government officials and party leaders who were responsible for locating heavily polluting industries, unsafe nuclear power plants, and nuclear testing ranges in national homelands lost what little legitimacy remained. L. Attwood, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001, In its first decade the Soviet Union concerned itself with challenging the traditional understandings of appropriate male and female behavior and social roles. During the 1980s, one could see the split in the Soviet leadership over Gorbachev's policies. One segment of the government-owned media was used to reach foreign audiences with carefully contrived propaganda messages. Thus, Gorbachev instituted two sets of reforms. Environmental issues played a key role in the liberalization of the Soviet system during the Gorbachev era. At the same time, women workers were essential in the Soviet Union's labor-intensive economy, and it was not possible simply to remove them from the workforce. On the contrary, the family was now held up as the basic cell of Soviet society. ____ was the goal of the program known as Star Wars. Guarded criticism had been voiced by scientists, journalists, and literary figures in the 1960s and 1970s of the issues of air and water contamination, the Aral Sea disaster, and planned diversion of Siberian rivers southward to Central Asia. Under Soviet federalism Moscow treated the non-Russian republics like colonies, exploiting their natural resources, degrading the land, locating polluting industries on their territory, and in the process jeopardizing the health of the population. In this sense an autopsy on the Soviet Union may indeed rule it death by ecocide (Feshbach and Friendly, 1992). In such an environment, the media appeal for funds either to the state or to rich elites, both of which then use the media for their own purposes. Beyond the immediate impact of such environmental victories, revelations of callous indifference to human life and well-being dramatically affected public opinion.

Following this conflict, ethnic movements arose elsewhere. Environmental concerns in the ethnic union republics meshed with nationalism, as the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and others accused Moscow of ecological colonialism. The Communist Party's assertions, that Soviet socialism was morally superior to capitalism and that national minorities benefited by living under Russian tutelage, were shown to be lies. Gender, though it was still not named as such, had become a major issue. Glasnost, criticism and self-criticism are not just a new campaign, said Gorbachev, they have been proclaimed and must become a norm in the Soviet way of life. The purpose of glasnost was political in nature and was directed from above. Nor were women to be truly free of domestic responsibilities. Importantly, democratization and ethnic mobilization had come to Russia: in 1991 Boris Yeltsin was elected the President of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) and could compete directly with Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. For that reason, Russian media, or Ukrainian versions of Russian media, are also very popular in Ukraine, where true independent and professional journalism is relatively uncommon. Weary of further possible attempts to reverse political liberalization and in the process to reduce their new-found privileges the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian republics (Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich, respectively) met and on December 8, 1991 signed the Belovezh Accords, which dissolved the USSR and replaced it with a weak confederation, the Commonwealth of Independent States. Most analysts concluded that the physical intimidation of journalists had been effective in generating individual and institutional self-censorship and, because of its success, had evolved into a pattern in Russia, albeit not perhaps a formal policy of governments and other institutions (apart from those that are overtly criminal). However, there was no attempt to rethink both male and female roles. The approach to environmental protection was to be systematic rather than discretely technical, in keeping with more recent holistic approaches to environmental protection. There were now some suggestions, albeit tentative, that husbands might be persuaded to ease their wives' burden by helping them in the home. Once political controls were relaxed, national discontent coalesced around the more obvious sources of Russian dominancethe Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, chemical plants in Armenia, nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, and oil pollution along Azerbaijan's coastline. Some theorists went so far as to argue that the family would serve no purpose at all in a communist society and in due course would simply wither away.. The first such moment was in NagornoKarabakh, an enclave of ethnic Armenians inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement organized demonstrations and protests across Kazakhstan calling for an end to nuclear weapons' testing, which reportedly contributed to high rates of cancer, skin disorders, miscarriages, genetic mutation, and depression. In the Soviet Union prior to 1986, the media were an instrument of Communist Party policy and served mostly to meet political and ideological needs; they were never part of the economic system. All resources were now required for industry, and if women were still willing to perform those traditional functions for free, the State would hardly fight for the right to fund them. The high level of female employment that had characterized the Soviet Union since the beginning of the Stalin era was no longer necessary. Gorbachev faced a major obstacle to reform: ministries and officials in the command economy would block any attempts at fundamental reform. In some successor countries, the media enjoy no more independence than during the first 70 years of Communist rule, and less freedom than during the glasnost period. Despite Moscow's attempts at control, the peoples of various groups did maintain some adherence to ethnic identities, and sometimes those identities led to conflict. During the years that followed, the media in Russia were largely privatized, and journalists defended their right to cover the news independently. While Gorbachev did not intend full-blown democracy and free elections, he did allow for increased participation by independent individuals (but not independent parties) in elections to the Supreme Soviet in 1990. A striking element of the substantial literature on communication development, extending from the early experiences in the rural areas of the United States to the rapid change in the post-Soviet outposts of Central Asia, is the lack of persuasive evidence in support of any of the diverse points of view about the influence (if any) of communication on development and about the importance (if any) of incorporating communication into national development policy. Most former Soviet republics fall somewhere in between, having adopted constitutions and laws that prohibit censorship but tolerating the official use of carrots and sticks to keep the journalistic community in line. While he suffered from kidney failure and was unable to push through much change, he did sow the seeds for reform by bringing in Mikhail Gorbachev as future Party leader. While Brezhnev's social contract made it difficult to address these issues without threatening his rule and that of his closest allies, after his death in 1982 the time for reform was necessary but not yet ripe. Women, concerned as they were with pollution-related birth defects and the health of their children and families, figured prominently in these movements. Women were simply to be incorporated into the hitherto male sphere of public service. By the early 1980s it was a badly-kept secret that the Soviet economy was stagnating (aging industrial machinery and continuously disappointing harvests) and social problems were on the rise (e.g., alcoholism was increasing the male life expectancy had reached a plateau and was beginning to fall). Women now found themselves laboring under a double burden. They were required to go out to work: there were simply not enough men to bring about industrialization at the speed or to the extent required by Stalin; but they also had to perform their traditional domestic and nurturing functions. Public opinion surveys discovered that an overwhelming majority of the population was concerned about the environmental problems and the threat to public health. 1989, p. 58). The 15 countries that were once union republics in the USSR have followed divergent political paths since the Soviet Union was disbanded at the end of 1991.