Reviews

Ference Feher, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship Over Needs, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, xiii+312 pp. £22.50.

Pierre Kende and Zdenek Strmiska, (Eds.) Egalités et inégalités en Europe de l’ Est, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1984.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilisation in Russia, 1914–17: A Study of the War‐Industries Committees, London, Macmillan (in association with St. Antony's College, Oxford), 1983, xix + 312 pp. £25.00

William J. Conyngham, The Modernization of Soviet Industrial Management, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 332 + ix. £19–50.

Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, society and religion in a Siberian collective farm. Cambridge, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xviii + 522 pp. £30–00 (£10–95 paperback).

Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym, Soviet Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, London, Macmillan, 1984, vii + 185 pp. £20.00.

James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine 1918–1933, Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Cambridge, Mass. 1983. xiv + 334 pp. $21.50.

Kalman Rupp, Entrepreneurs in Red, State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., 1983. 260 + xvii pp. £37.60 (hardback) £14.25 (paperback).

Cole Blasier, The Giant's Rival: the USSR and Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983, xvi + 213 pp. $7.95 (paperback).     

The origins of penal populism

Five years ago after 46 years of daily deadlines – the last 38 on The Guardian – I retired to explore, with the help of Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Nuffield College Oxford fellowships, just how much influence was played by the media in the policy making process. The exercise was prompted by rising public concern over the ever widening power of the media. Onora O'Neill, the philosopher, in her Reith lectures in 2002 on trust in public institutions, noted with irony that the main champion of transparency and accountability – the media – were themselves the least transparent and accountable group in democracy. Anthony Sampson, a distinguished journalist, in his fourth edition of Anatomy of Britain in 2004, documented just how entrenched this perception was.     

Two Comments on Manning. “The Enslavement of Africans: A Demographic Model,” CJAS/RCEA, 15 (1981), and a Response

This article concerns the resilience of the ethno-linguistic categories in Sudan and analyses the role played by the linguistic classifications established by modern comparative linguistics. As well as a somewhat conventional review of the ethno-linguistic classifications seen as “colonial inventions” by postcolonial studies, it calls for a contextualised analysis of the development of these categories and in particular of their use and socio-political impact from the colonial period to today in a context where the widespread competition for access to power and resources is being settled to a great extent by the possibility of being recognised as an autonomous ethnic entity.