What are the common guidelines for writing a thesis in European and English-speaking countries? Currently I'm a student at one of the russian universities which obviously requires me to write theses and similar academic papers in Russian. Most russian universities (and CIS unis, in my observation) follow locally modefied versions of Soviet thesis structure guidelines. In my writing I regularly rely on English-language papers from JSTORE and the like, but one particular thing I've noticed is that the structure of those papers was, though logical, nontheless depended on a given author, even in cases when authors work and publish their papers in the same uni. In other words, I couldn't track a hint of more or less universal structure across multiple papers. Such practice is very uncommon in post-Soviet countries, as structure here is explicit and tengible (for example, paragraphs within introductory chapter are clearly defined and have comparable composition across the majority of papers in CIS countries).

Back to my main question. Are there any official guidelines which students/researchers are compelled to follow within a solitary uni or a cluster? Can you point out to a resource that can shed light upon academic writing tradition in English-speaking and/or European countries?
There are some common structures that show up frequently (e.g. Introduction-Background-Methods-Results-Discussion is common for experiment-based papers), but they are different for different fields, and it is not mandatory to follow them. Some universities (mine among them, but I'm not in Europe) give "Thesis Writing" classes, where you get an overview of the various strategies. You could look up materials from these classes, maybe they will help.