Preface
Ten years have passed since the USSR collapsed in late December 1991. We
have witnessed tremendous changes both inside and outside the territory of theformer Soviet Union (FSU) since then. The Slavic Research Center (SRC) organized its winter international symposium in January 2002 as an opportunity to reconsider the significance of the collapse of the USSR. The topics discussed included activities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and transformations of political and socio-economic life in the FSU and the former
East-European countries. The program of the symposium is attached at the end of
this booklet.
A part of the funding of the symposium was covered by the four-year project “Comprehensive Study on Integration of Russia into the World Economy”(Project leader: TABATA Shinichiro). This project aims to consider various aspectsof Russia’s integration into the world economy, including financial flows between
Russia and the rest of the world (flows of oil and gas export earnings, foreign direct investment, international borrowing, foreign debt payments, capital flight,
and so on), its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its relations
with the CIS.
This booklet includes only those papers presented at the symposium which
are most closely related to the topic of the project described above. Most of theother papers submitted to the symposium will be published in different occasional papers of the SRC or Acta Slavica Iaponica.
The first chapter of this proceeding is written by Ivan KOROTCHENYA,
Executive Secretary of the CIS in 1993-1998, who is really a walking dictionary onthe CIS. We believe that his participation in our symposium greatly deepened ourunderstanding of the CIS, as an institution. He summarizes the activities of theCIS in the past decade. Basically the same topic is discussed in the second chapter
by a Japanese top expert on this problem, SUEZAWA Megumi. She pays
well-balanced attention to the decentralization factors in the CIS.
In the third chapter SUZUKI Yuji, a noted specialist in international relations in Asia, analyzes changes in East and South-east Asian countries during
these ten years, mainly focusing his attention on the globalization and localizationthat characterized the transformation in that region. In the fourth chapter, Evgeniy ABDULLAEV, a young and spirited scholar from Uzbekistan, discusses theproblems of regional integration in the Central Asia, comparing it with integration trends in other regions.
A slightly different type of paper, dealing with the economic transformationin Central-Eastern Europe written by WATANABE Hiroshi, an acknowledged
expert on this topic in Japan, is included in the fifth chapter. We can learn fromhis analysis of the exchange rate policy in Central-Eastern Europe the critical roleof this policy in the transformation process from the socialist economy. The finalchapter is devoted to a truly important theme for Russia, the problem of fiscal
federalism with its socio-political implications. Its author is Sergei CHUGROV, aneminent specialist of the Institute of World Economy and International Relationsi(IMEMO) in Moscow.
The editors acknowledge the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS) for its Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) “Comprehensive Study on
Integration of Russia into the World Economy” in 2001-2004.

TABATA Shinichiro
IWASHITA Akihiro
Editors
Sapporo, July 2002ii