News

More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.

University of London published a list of ICEF students who received Awards and Letters of Commendation for Academic Achievements on the University of London International Programme 2015.

On September 24, 2015, a delegation of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) visited HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK).  With the goal to identify perspective areas of cooperation, researchers of HSE and MOST delegates shared their unique fields of expertise and discussed key trends and instruments of Taiwan’s and Russia’s state policy on international cooperation in science, technology, and industrial innovation. During the visit, Dr. Yi-Bing Lin, Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, gave an interview to the HSE news portal, in which he cited Karl Marx’s theory, while talking about big data and futures studies.

On 9th October the name of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2015 will be announced. During ‘Nobel week’ HSE academics discuss who might be the winner.

Over the past three years, the business climate in Russia has improved for companies with a long planning horizon and for those receiving government support. State-owned companies, however, have been worse off after losing their privileges and facing a level playing field, according to Andrei Yakovlev, director of the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, Irina Levina, research fellow at the same Institute, and Anastasia Kazun, postgraduate student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.

Stalin: Zhizn odnovo vozhdya or Stalin: New Biography of A Dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk, Leading Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of WWII and Its Consequences, has won the Prosvetitel [Enlightener] 2015 Prize for Biography.  

How Russians think bears little resemblance to Germans’ attention to detail or American cheerfulness. The difference can be explained, at least in part, by looking at linguistic peculiarities. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) launched by HSE called ‘Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication’ investigates cases when basic Russian cultural values show up through linguistic choices, which may influence the way people act. The nine-week course was first offered in 2014 and was tremendously successful. It will run for the second time starting October 12, 2015. Mira Bergelson, professor in the Faculty of Humanities at HSE and the author of the course, shared the core principles of making contact with people who don’t smile on the street but who may become your best friends after just a few meetings.

Samrat Sil, a student from Presidency University in Kolkata, India is currently studying on the Master’s programme in Applied and Interdisciplinary History at HSE St. Petersburg. The programme focuses on the analytical part of history and how it can be used and applied in our day to day life. It comprises a wide variety of crucial topics like memory, identity narratives and the use of sources in history and historiography. It also focuses on heritage and its relation to history and economy. The students are encouraged to develop their own research topics for their Master’s thesis.