John P. Moran

Written by John P. Moran

John P. Moran is a Professor of Political Science at Kennesaw State University. He has also served in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy)/Chairman, Joint Chiefs; United States Mission to United Nations; United State Embassy, Moscow; and United States Field Systems Agency, Tokyo. He is author of From Garrison State to Nation State: The Russian Military and Political Power under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (Praeger, 2001) and The Solution of the Fist: Dostoevsky and the Roots of Modern Terrorism (Lexington Books, 2009).

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As Isaiah Berlin once noted, Fyodor Dostoevsky is perhaps the most “centripetal” of all Russian writers.1 This is to say that all of his thoughts and inquiries ultimately gravitated toward addressing one central question: can human society exist without God? Famously, Dostoevsky was pessimistic about this. However, instead of relying upon theological or rational justifications for the role of religion…

It is often said that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina begins with one of the most famous first sentences in world literature: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."[1]  Interestingly, this oft-spoken statement is incorrect; this sentence is not actually the first sentence of the novel.  The first sentence of the novel is the epigraph…

New Trends in Russian Political Mentality: Putin 3.0. Elena Shestopal, ed. Lanham, Lexington Books, 2015.
 
Quantitative measures of political phenomena can be enormously appealing.  They seem to provide a parsimonious expression of political reality.  The "scientific" basis of quantitative methodology also lends to it a logical rigor not found in purely descriptive approaches of politics.   Unfortunately, they are often inaccurate. …