Basile Kerblay and his scholarship

The intention of this sketch is to reflect upon Basile Kerblay’s way in scholarship by presenting a selection of themes he handled and how he handled them to be used as probes that may help to bring out the professional profile of this outstanding scholar. Let us begin by referring first to his monograph on the “izba paysanne” – the peasants’ hut, a small masterpiece in its own right. It is being done without nails – so the structure is dependent on different parts (beams) – whether of the fu..

Rebuilding the Soviet nomenklatura 1945-1948

RésuméLa reconstruction de la nomenklatura soviétique, 1945-1948.Le terme nomenklatura a été abondamment utilisé sans pour autant que le phénomène social et politique que ce terme recouvre ait été véritablement analysé. À la sortie de la guerre, les procédures de contrôle du parti sur les nominations des responsables, qui avaient été mises en place depuis les années 1920, ont été très largement vidées de leur sens du fait d’un processus qui place chaque département du Comité central dans la dépendance du ministère qu’il est pourtant censé contrôler et qui a développé à la faveur de la guerre son autonomie fondée sur des compétences et des moyens financiers. Les années 1946-1948 apparaissent comme le moment crucial où le Comité central tente de trouver les outils administratifs assortis d’un essai de discours de mobilisation idéologique (dans le contexte du jdanovisme) afin de redonner aux instances dirigeantes du parti la prééminence dans le recrutement des responsables. Cette reprise en main s’avère cependant rapidement vouée à l’échec face au renforcement des « nomenklaturistes », cette « cohorte » dirigeante en train d’acquérir, comme en témoigne sa présentation sociologique, une stabilité et un certain nombre d’avantages qui ne feront que s’accentuer dans les années post-staliniennes.AbstractThe term nomenklatura has been widely used but the social and political phenomenon it refers to has never really been analyzed. At the end of World War II, the party’s control over the staffing of key positions in place since the 1920s nearly came to nothing when each department of the Central Committee became subjected to the ministry that it was supposed to control -- ministries having acquired autonomy during the war thanks to their efficiency and financial means. There was a turning point in 1946-1948 when (in the midst of Zhdanovism) the Central Committee tried to find the administrative means and ideological incentives to help party leaders regain the upper hand in the recruiting of officials. This initiative proved very soon to be doomed to failure in the face of a swelling corpus of nomenklaturshchiki, this cohort of leaders that eventually -- as its sociological study demonstrates -- acquired greater stability and an ever-increasing number of privileges during the years following Stalin’s death

Wealth Inequality in Europe and the Delusive Egalitarianism of Scandinavian Countries

Abstract Past social inequality research mainly focused on labor market processes and income distributions. We argue that in order to achieve a more profound picture of economic well-being analyzing wealth and not income seems to be more adequate because income is only one dimension to explain individuals' (economic) well-being. In our study we are investigating the distribution of wealth among the elderly across Europe drawing on Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states. Our analyses based on data from the SHARE project suggest (1) a strong variation in the wealth distribution between European countries, an

Primary accumulation in the Soviet transition

The Soviet background to the idea of primary socialist accumulation is presented. The mobilisation of labour power and of products into public sector investment from outside are shown to have been the two original forms of the concept. In Soviet primary accumulation the mobilisation of labour power was apparently more decisive than the mobilisation of products. The primary accumulation process had both intended and unintended results. Intended results included bringing most of the economy into the public sector, and industrialisation of the economy as a whole. Unintended results included substantial economic losses, and the proliferation of coercive institutions damaging to attainment of the ultimate goal - the building of a communist society

Quantum critical scaling and the Gross-Neveu model in 2+1 dimensions

The quantum critical behavior of the 2+1 dimensional Gross--Neveu model in the vicinity of its zero temperature critical point is considered. The model is known to be renormalisable in the large $N$ limit, which offers the possibility to obtain expressions for various thermodynamic functions in closed form. We have used the concept of finite--size scaling to extract information about the leading temperature behavior of the free energy and the mass term, defined by the fermionic condensate and determined the crossover lines in the coupling (\g) -- temperature ($T$) plane. These are given by T\sim|\g-\g_c|, where \g_c denotes the critical coupling at zero temperature. According to our analysis no spontaneous symmetry breaking survives at finite temperature. We have found that the leading temperature behavior of the fermionic condensate is proportional to the temperature with the critical amplitude $\frac{\sqrt{5}}3\pi$. The scaling function of the singular part of the free energy is found to exhibit a maximum at $\frac{\ln2}{2\pi}$ corresponding to one of the crossover lines. The critical amplitude of the singular part of the free energy is given by the universal number $\frac13[\frac1{2\pi}\zeta(3)-\mathrm{Cl}_2(\frac{\pi}3)]=-0.274543...$, where $\zeta(z)$ and $\mathrm{Cl}_2(z)$ are the Riemann zeta and Clausen's functions, respectively. Interpreted in terms the thermodynamic Casimir effect, this result implies an attractive Casimir "force". This study is expected to be useful in shedding light on a broader class of four fermionic models.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Allocation under dictatorship : research in Stalin’s archives

We survey recent research on the Soviet economy in the state, party, and military archives of the Stalin era. The archives have provided rich new evidence on the economic arrangements of a command system under a powerful dictator including Stalin’s role in the making of the economic system and economic policy, Stalin’s accumulation objectives and the constraints that limited his power to achieve them, the limits to administrative allocation, the information flows and incentives that governed the behavior of economic managers, the scope and significance of corruption and market-oriented behavior, and the prospects for economic reform

Control of Noise in Chemical and Biochemical Information Processing

We review models and approaches for error-control in order to prevent the buildup of noise when gates for digital chemical and biomolecular computing based on (bio)chemical reaction processes are utilized to realize stable, scalable networks for information processing. Solvable rate-equation models illustrate several recently developed methodologies for gate-function optimization. We also survey future challenges and possible new research avenues.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figures, PD

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

The civil war-dynamics and legacy

Preliminaries The period of the Civil War is, no doubt, crucial in the history of the new regime. The dating of this period is debatable. It can be said that it begun in November 1917 and ended in the middle of 1922. The assumption behind this dating is based on the need to include in the given chronological segment all the most important trends and traits that produced the flavour and substance of the period, particular ways of acting and specific culture in the emerging system and its leade..