Martha brill olcott biography for kids

This compete history of one of the largest non-Slavic ethnic groups charts it from its emergence in the mid—fifteenth century to the present.

Martha Brill Olcott is a leading United States.

Olcott details the major events that have shaped the character of the Islamic nation of Kazakhstan, discussing the rise and fall of the Kazakh Khanate, the Kazakhs in imperial Russia, revolutionary and Soviet Kazakhstan, and the struggle for autonomy under Soviet rule. On December 8, , even before the Soviet Union was officially dissolved, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine met in the Belovezh Forest outside Minsk to lay the groundwork for the post-Soviet era.

Two weeks later, eight other Soviet republics joined the three founding members. In the void left by the collapse of the USSR, the CIS was to become a superstructure that would coordinate the foreign and security policies of the member states, develop a common economic space, and provide for an orderly transition from the Soviet Union to the post-Soviet phase.

Martha Brill Olcott ( – February 5, ) was an American political scientist who was an expert on Central Asia and the Caspian.

In reality, the CIS has failed. For Russia, the CIS has not served as a vehicle for exerting control over its neighbors. As an organization, the CIS has not succeeded at reintegrating the post-Soviet states. The desire of the new nations to assert themselves as independent entities has proven more powerful than their urge to replace the Soviet Union with a new system of collective government.

Written by three of the West's leading experts on the former Soviet Union, this book offers a comprehensive assessment of how and why the CIS has failed. At the outset of independence 18 years ago, Kazakhstan's leaders promised that the country's rich natural resources, with oil and gas reserves among the largest in the world, would soon bring economic prosperity.

It appeared that democracy was beginning to take hold in this newly independent state. Nearly two decades later, Kazakhstan has achieved the World Bank's ranking of a "middle economic country," but its economy is straining from the global economic crisis. The country's political system still needs fundamental reform before Kazakhstan can be considered a democracy.

Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise examines the development of this ethnically diverse and strategically vital nation, which seeks to play an influential role on the international stage. Praise for the previous edition of Kazakhstan: "This detailed but accessible work will be the definitive work on the newly independent state of Kazakhstan.

She taught political science at Colgate University from until