The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (239 page)

Russian revolution
, 1991

The so-called second Russian revolution occurred in August 1991 when the coup by hard-liners wishing to prevent the demise of communist power and the Soviet Union was defeated. The coup took place on the eve of the signing of a new union treaty that envisaged the transfer of power from the centre to the republics. Mikhail Gorbachev , the President of the USSR, was on holiday in the Crimea when the coup took place. On 19 August, a ‘State Committee for the State of Emergency’ appeared on television, headed by the Vice-President Gennady Yanaev and including the prime minister, and heads of the KGB and the Soviet Army, and declared itself in control. It was opposed by the Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament. World attention was focused on the parliament building itself, ‘the White House’, where thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators congregated in defence of the Russian leadership inside. Despite repeated warnings of immanent military action, an attack never came and after three days the Committee surrendered and Mikhail Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The real victory, however, went to Boris Yeltsin. The failed coup exacerbated the centrifugal tendencies already evident, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
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See
minimax
.

 
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(1760–1825)
One of the ‘founding fathers’ of both modern social science and
socialism
, and an important figure in nineteenth century
utopianism
. He was concerned mainly with the causes and consequences of social and political upheaval in the age of the
French Revolution
, and sought to address the complex questions of the future direction of European society in the aftermath of the collapse of feudalism and the old monarchical, aristocratic, and Roman Catholic structures of the eighteenth century. His originality lay in his emphasis on the modernizing forces of science, industry, and technological innovation, and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to convince his contemporaries of the need to adapt social and political systems to those new forces.
It was Saint-Simon's disciples, after his death, who were largely responsible for the explicit use of the idea of ‘socialism’ to denote the collectivist orientation of his mature thought. Most later thinkers in the nineteenth-century socialist tradition—including
Marx
—drew inspiration from Saint-Simonian teachings.
Saint-Simon's attempts to found a scientific study of man and society were rooted in the rationalist philosophy of the
Enlightenment
, and led towards
positivism
through the link with Auguste
Comte
, who worked as Saint-Simon's assistant in the early 1820s. Both Saint-Simon and Comte emphasized the importance of religion as a source of social integration, and tended—in the manner of many French social theorists of the nineteenth century—to work towards a reconciliation of modern scientificrational thought and the religious order. Thus, in Saint-Simon's last and most influential work,
Nouveau Christianisme
(New Christianity, 1825), the emphasis was on the ethical and essentially Christian principles of social reform in the name of greater equality and social justice for the working classes.
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French mathematician who in 1910 proposed the fairest system of
apportionment
of integer numbers of seats to each party in list systems of
proportional representation
with multimember seats. The system had been independently proposed by Daniel Webster in 1832 for the apportionment of seats in the US House of Representatives to states. The SainteLagüe system of apportionment is apparently too fair to small parties to be used anywhere in Europe; the version in use in Scandinavia is deliberately biased in favour of large parties.

 
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SALT
(Strategic Arms Limitation Talks)

Preliminary discussions to limit the long-range missiles and bombers of the two superpowers began in 1967. They were broken off by the Americans as a result of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, resumed in November 1969 under the name of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and concluded in May 1972. The treaty froze the numbers of strategic ‘launchers’ (missiles or bombers) for five years but permitted modernization and increases in the number of warheads which the launchers could carry. A second agreement, normally considered under the heading of SALT, prohibited permanently deployment of more than very limited defensive systems against offensive missiles. In 1979 a second SALT treaty was concluded which provided for very small reductions in the numbers of Soviet launchers and permitted considerable increases in the numbers of warheads deployed. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 the Americans abandoned the ratification process and the treaty lapsed, though in practice both sides kept roughly within its very comfortable limits until the conclusion of the next round of strategic arms negotiations known as
START
.
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