Criticism and bibliography. Reviews.  Laos is a country located in the depths of the Indochina Peninsula, with its ancient history and its place in the global system of the modern world community. At the same time, Laos is one of the small number of developing countries in Southeast Asia that have been at war for many years since the end of World War II. When Laos became an independent and sovereign State at the end of 1975, it was faced with the most difficult tasks of modernizing the archaic economy, creating a reliable political system, and raising the standard of living of the population. Today, the Lao People's Democratic Republic is a member of the UN and other influential international and regional organizations, including ASEAN (since 1997). It pursues a constructive foreign policy, developing relations not only with nearby countries - China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, India, but also with more distant ones-the United States States, EU states, and many others. Laos ' ties with Russia are gradually expanding, which is greatly facilitated by the Russian Federation's write-off of a significant part of the country's debt to it. All this is professionally described in the book of S. I. Ioanesyan, a well-known and perhaps the only Russian country expert on Laos. It should be noted that the scope of the study is much broader than indicated in the subtitle. Constructed according to the chronological principle, the work contains a brief excursion into the history of Laos (up to December 12, 1975), and then focuses on the main problems of modernizing Lao society. Their solution is divided into three stages: the initial stage of transformation (1975-1979), the second stage (1980-1986), and the third (beginning in the second half of the 1980s), designated as the transition to radical market reforms, which is currently ongoing. The book, rich in a large amount of factual material and statistical calculations, will undoubtedly arouse the interest of not only specialis ... Read more