Reviews

Roman Szporluk (ed.), National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1994, xiii + 328 pp., £40.00 h/b, £16.00 p/b.

Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics. London: Hurst, 1995, xii + 340 pp., £35.00.

Ronald Grigor Suny, The Révenge of the Past. Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, xix + 207 pp., £25.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Ian Bremmer & Ray Taras (eds), Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, xxvii + 557 pp., £55.00 h/b, £17.95 p/b.

Charles A. Kupchan (ed.), Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xi + 224 pp., £31.50 h/b, £11.95 p/b.

Christopher Williams, AIDS in Post‐Communist Russia and its Successor States. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, xvi + 216 pp., £35.00.

Amin Saikal & William Maley (eds), Russia in Search of its Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xii + 239 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Marco de Andreis & Francesco Calogero, The Soviet Nuclear Weapon Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, x + 130 pp., £25.00.

Eva Haraszti‐Taylor, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956. A Collection of Documents from the British Foreign Office. London: Astra Press, 1995, xxxii + 404 pp., £5.95.

Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie & E. A. Rees (eds), Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies. London and Basingstoke: St Martin's Press, 1995, xxviii + 273 pp. £45.00.

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sovetskoi Armii. Putevoditel’ v dvukh tomakh. Minneapolis: East View Publications, Vol. 1, v + 421 pp., Vol. 2, vi + 531 pp., 1991, 1993, £59.00.

Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, xiv + 455 pp.

Semion Lyandres, The Bolsheviks’ ‘German Gold’ Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations. Pittsburgh: Carl Beck Papers No. 1106, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1995, 132 pp., no price.

Al Richardson (ed.), In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings. 1917–1923. London: Porcupine Press, 1995, xvi + 287 pp., £12.99.

Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System. A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 227 pp., £45.00.

Alexsandras Shtromas (ed.), The End of “Isms"? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995, 234 pp., £13.99.

Simon Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, vi + 199 pp., £7.95.

David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, xv + 282 pp., £26.95.

Heather Hogan, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xviii + 319 pp., £32.50.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (ed.), Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia. Armonk, New York, London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995, xii + 270 pp.

Michael D. Kennedy (ed.), Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 249 pp., £30.00.

Blanche H. Gelfant, Cross‐Cultural Reckonings: A Triptych of Russian, American, and Canadian Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, x + 190 pp., £35.00.     

Elections and government spending

It is widely believed that electoral pressures cause legislators to favor government spending programs. This electoral theory of spending is shown to encompass two core hypotheses: (1) the electoral consequences hypothesis, which states that support for spending programs improves the representative's electoral showing; and (2) the legislator insecurity hypothesis, which states that greater electoral insecurity leads representatives to be more in favor of spending programs. A test of these ideas using spending scores for U.S. representatives in 1986 finds that neither hypothesis is supported by the data.     

Book reviews

A. L. Meiendorf, Optimizatsiya khozyaistvennykh reshenii: metod analiza prirashchenii. Series: Aktual'nye problemy sel'skogo khozyaistva. Moscow: ‘Ekonomika’, 1976.

Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia. A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region, 1920–21. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1976. xiv+457 pp. $12.95.

Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Khrushchev—The Years in Power. London: OUP, 1977. xi+198 pp. £3.95.

Daniel F. Calhoun, The United Front: the TUC and the Russians, 1923–1928. Cambridge: CUP, 1976. 450 pp. £10.50.

Gabriel Gorodetsky, The Precarious Truce. Anglo‐Soviet Relations 1924–27. Cambridge: CUP, 1977. 289 pp. £9.00.

Herbert S. Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. 302 pp. $14.95.

Donald R. Kelley, Kenneth R. Stunkel, Richard R. Wescott, The Economic Superpowers and the Environment: The United States, The Soviet Union, and Japan. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976. 335 pp.

Fred Singleton (ed.), Environmental Misuse in the Soviet Union. New York and London: Praeger Publishers, 1976. xvii+103 pp. $13.50. £8.80.

Peter H. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order. Politics and Social Change in the USSR. New York: The Free Press, and London: Collier MacMillan, 1976. xii+274 pp. £11.05.

Richard Szawlowski, The System of the International Organizations of the Communist Countries. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1976. 322 pp.

Jürg Meister, Soviet Warships of the Second World War. London: Macdonald & Jane, 1977. 348 pp. £7.95.     

Gender Differences in Self-Perceptions and Academic Outcomes: A Study of African American High School Students

There is increasing divergence in the academic outcomes of African American males and females. By most accounts, males are falling behind their female peers educationally as African American females are graduating from high schools at higher rates and are going on to college and graduate school in greater numbers. Some have suggested that school completion and performance is associated with how students feel about themselves. The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in the relationship between self-perceptions and 2 academic outcomes among a sample of 243 African American high school sophomores. The results suggest that, overall, females are more favorably oriented toward high school completion. Both male and female students with more positive self-perceptions have stronger intentions to complete the current year of high school. Higher grade point averages were more strongly associated with greater self-efficacy for females than for males. Given these findings, increased attention to educational programming, societal messages, and future research is warranted.