Spin effects in hard collision processes

Questions of conservation and nonconservation of parity in phenomena associated with particle spin are reviewed. The main attention is concentrated on the production of hadrons, jets, and photons with large momentum transfer and the production of lepton pairs. The mechanisms of the hard-scattering subprocess include exchange of W+- and Z0 mesons, QCD and QED, and also interference between QCD and the weak interactions and between QED and the weak interactions. Effective cross sections of hard scattering processes are calculated, a factorization of the hadron--hadron scattering cross section is proposed, and the possible types of spin effects manifested in the hadronic subprocesses are classified and discussed. The properties of the polarized proton distributions and polarized structure functions are given in two appendices