The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has recently acquired the papers of Brendan Kiernan, a US political scientist and consultant whose research and activities took him to the USSR and Russian Federation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While there, he collected a great amount of information on the emergence of political plurality in the Soviet system and its later development in the independent Russian Federation. Kiernan is the author of The End of Soviet Politics : Elections, Legislatures, and the Demise of the Communist Party (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
Most of this collection consists of political ephemera, including printed matter, limited-distribution reports, analytical studies, promotional material, speeches, appeals and leaflets produced by nascent political parties and movements in the late Soviet period. This material will be of interest to researchers interested in the development of democracy during the late USSR and early Russian Federation.
This collection as a whole is an excellent complement to the Demokraticheskaia Rossiia records, Michael McFaul papers, Vladimir Pribylovskii collection, Dmitrii Levchik papers and other collections dealing with political developments in the failing USSR and emerging Russian Federation.
