Reviews

Hillel Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. ix + 192 pp., $45.00 h/b, $19.95 p/b. Walter D. Connor, The Accidental Proletariat: Workers, Politics, and Crisis in Gorbachev's Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, xvi + 375 pp., £25.00. $39.50.

Archie Brown, ed., New Thinking in Soviet Politics. London: Macmillan, 1992, xii + 115 pp., £30.00 h/b, £9.99 p/b.

Vadim Bakatin, Osvobozhdenie ot illyuzii. Kemerovo: Kemerovskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1992, 183 pp.

Robert T. Huber & Donald R. Kelley, eds., Perestroika‐Era Politics: The New Legislature and Gorbachev's Political Reforms. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1991, viii + 246 pp., £39.95.

Gavin Peebles. A Short History of Socialist Money. London and Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991, xiii + 170 pp., £30.00 h/b, £11.95 p/b.

Vitalii A. Naishul’, The Supreme and Last Stage of Socialism, Centre for Research into Communist Economies, New Series 2, 1991, 48 pp., £3.50.

Anders Aslund, ed., Market Socialism or the Restoration of Capitalism? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, x + 215 pp., $49.50, £30.00.

Anthony Jones & William Moskoff, Ko‐ops: The Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, xvii+ 153 pp., £20.00 h/b, £9.50 p/b.

Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika. London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1991, 258 pp., £12.95.

Leah A. Haus, Globalizing Gatt: The Soviet Union's Successor States, Eastern European and the International Trading System. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1992, x + 141 pp., $38.95 h/b, $10.95 p/b.

Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., Erik P. Hoffman, Robbin F. Laird, eds, Soviet Foreign Policy: Classic and Contemporary Issues. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991, xviii + 857 pp., DM 178 h/b, DM 98 p/b. Also published as Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., Erik P. Hofmann, Robbin F. Laird, eds, Classic Issues in Soviet Foreign Policy: From Lenin to Brezhnev. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991, xvi + 349 pp., DM 48 p/b; and Frederic J. Fleron, Jr. Erik P. Hoffmann, Robbin F. Laird, eds, Contemporary Issues in Soviet Foreign Policy: From Brezhnev to Gorbachev. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991, xviii+ 521 pp., DM 54 p/b.

Steven Kull, Burying Lenin. The Revolution in Soviet Ideology & Foreign Policy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. xvi + 219 pp., £10.95 p/b.

Lowell Dittmer, Sino‐Soviet Normalisation and Its International Implications, 1945–1990. Seattle, WA, and London: University of Washington Press, 1992, vii + 373 pp., $35.00.

Haim Shemesh, Soviet‐Iraqi Relations, 1986–1988: In the Shadow of the Iraq‐Iran Conflict. London: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 1992, x + 285 pp., £31.95.

Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press (Distributed in UK by Open University Press), 1991, xv + 215 pp., £18.50.

Beatrice Farnsworth & Lynne Viola, eds, Russian Peasant Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 304 pp., £13.50 p/b.

George Sanford, ed. and transl., Democratization in Poland, 1988–90. London: Macmillan, 1992, xv + 203 pp., £40.00.

Tania Konn, ed., Soviet Studies Guide. London: Bowker‐Saur, 1992, xvi + 237 pp., £39.00 h/b.     

Natural gas security problems in Europe: the Russian–Ukrainian crisis of 2006

Energy security is, once again, a fashionable topic of conversation in Europe particularly in relation to natural gas, but most of the commentary is relatively general, failing to identify any specific problems. The Russian–Ukrainian gas crisis of January 2006 focussed attention on a specific natural gas security problem: the impact of a bilateral dispute on the transit of Russian gas via Ukraine. This episode reinforced old security lessons on the importance of diversity of routes and sources, but also showed that current events can be more influential than projections of supply adequacy at some date in the future. This event has highlighted the potential role of the European Union in natural gas diplomacy, and the Energy Charter Treaty in the legal framework for gas transit. But the most important legacy of the episode may be not in Russia–EU, but in Russia–CIS, energy relations.     

Continuity and Change in Executive Leadership: Insights from the Perspectives of State Administrators

Executive leadership in state government is examined at two levels, both from the perspectives of the heads of state administrative agencies responding to mail question surveys in 1994, 1998, and 2004. At one level, the status and strength of the governor in controlling and leading the executive branch are assessed. At the second (agency) level, state executives (and their agencies) are assessed on four criteria that are connected, directly or indirectly, with the aims of the Winter Commission: leadership, responsiveness, reforms (at the agency level), and performance (through contracting). State administration generally reflects a balance between continuity and change, with more of the former at the gubernatorial (and legislative) level, and more of the latter at the state agency level.     

The Rise of Asian Defense Diplomacy： Convergence or Divergence in Sino-Australian Security Relations？

The rise of multilateral defense diplomacy in Asia is an important new phenomenon.In addition to the newly established ADMM+ process and the Shangri-La Dialogue(SLD) ,ASEAN defense ministers,ASEAN chiefs of defense and ASEAN chiefs of intelligence are now all meeting on a regular basis.Such gatherings were almost unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.This paper seeks to interpret these developments and their implications for the Sino-Australian security relationship.It argues that while these recent developments appear to reflect a deepening of Asian security cooperation,they are actually a manifestation of an intensifying institutional competition,namely between the ASEAN-centered ADMM and the Western-backed SLD.This,in turn,is symptomatic of a broader institutional contestation——reflecting underlying strategic competition——which is becoming a distinctive feature of Asia’s emerging security ‘architecture.’ The paper goes on to argue that China and Australia find themselves on opposite sides of this competition and,particularly in the area of defense diplomacy,are likely to become increasingly important players in fuelling it.The paper concludes by observing why such a dynamic is potentially problematic and offers a modest set of policy recommendations designed to assist Beijing and Canberra in addressing and alleviating their competitive tendencies.     

Connecting the Candidates: Consultant Networks and the Diffusion of Campaign Strategy in American Congressional Elections

Modern American political campaigns are typically conceptualized as “candidate‐centered” and treated as conditionally independent in quantitative analyses. In reality, however, these campaigns are linked by professional consulting firms, which are important agents of campaign strategy diffusion within the extended party networks of the contemporary era. To test our hypothesis that consultants disseminate campaign strategies among their clients, we analyze new data on U.S. House elections derived from Federal Election Commission records. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find that candidates who share consultants are more likely to use similar campaign strategies than we would otherwise expect, conditional on numerous explanatory variables. These results, which largely withstand an extensive series of robustness and falsification tests, suggest that consultants play a key role in diffusing strategies among congressional campaigns.