During autumn I993 and spring 1994, the iruthor worked as a consultant and trainer for a group of independent social organizations in the city of Voronezh, central Russia. In this article he discusses the main features of voluntary sector development in that city and the characteristics of associations currently active there. Thefindings indicate a voluntary sector that is both extensive and diverse, in which self-organizing mutual aid is the predominant organizational form. The findings are discussed against a historical background that traces the development of independent social activism in the former Soviet Union buck to the pre-Gorbachev period. It is this background that may help to explain the rapid growth and surprising complexity of the sector today.HIS article considers an issue that has so far received little attention in academic discourse, either from speciaiists in T Soviet and post-Communist studies or from researchers of voluntary sector organization. For a brief period in the late 1980s, political scientists in particular wrote a good deal about the multitude of unofficial social movements that appeared in Russia in the wake of Glasnost, but this was principally because these movements were regarded as political parties in the making and as harbingers of a transition to a multiparty system. Less interest was shown in the wider impact on Soviet society of the new activism, one result of which was that literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens were able, for virtually the first time, to articulate their needs and grievances without fear of recrimination and to participate in the work of grassroots organizations over which they exercised genuine control.In this article, I summarize the development of independent social organizations during the Gorbachev revolution and place this change in its historical context. Moving to the present day, I consider Note: The title of the article is taken from Mikhail Gorbachev's (1988) Perestroika.

Scholars of Development Studies have largely distanced themselves from research into external advice on governance reform in Ukraine, regarding post‐communist reconstruction as a political rather than developmental project. This article suggests that these seemingly distinct fields of donor intervention have more in common than is usually thought. It examines the influence of external advice on an issue which has particular resonance in the light of recent events in Ukraine, the relationship between Kyiv and the regions. It is argued that the impact of international assistance in this area has been negligible, largely due to institutional factors on the donor side, and that the most persuasive explanations for this are to be found in the literature of Development Studies.

No abstract