Britain and the supergun

The controversy over the case of the Iraqui Supergun project, and over the possible role of British firms in supplying parts for its construction, was major news in 1990, and again in the year and a half following the Gulf War. It led to considerable new coverage, and to an investigation by a Department of Trade and Industry committee into the conduct of industrial firms, and of the officials who monitor arms-related exports. While many have concluded that the supergun affair primarily reflected administrative overload or incompetence, and while the official investigation took a narrow view of the major issues involved, closer scrutiny shows complex dealings among governments, businesses, and well-connected individuals. A full understanding of the supergun affair is only now beginning to emerge.     

Reviews

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996, xx + 923 pp., £25.00

Hafeez Malik (ed.), The Roles of the United States, Russia and China in the New World Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, xvi + 333 pp., £47.50.

Leszek Buszynski, Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War. Westport and London: Praeger, 1996, xiv + 243 pp., £46.95.

Mette Skak, From Empire to Anarchy: Postcommunist Foreign Policy and International Relations. London: C. Hurst & Company, 1996, x + 340 pp., £35.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Hans von Zon, The Future of Industry in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Avebury, 1996, x + 164 pp., £35.00.

Bartlomiej Kaminski (ed.), Economic Transition in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, xviii + 430 pp.

Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, xii + 273 pp., £40.00

Juan J. Linz & Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America, and Post‐Communist Europe. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, xx + 479 pp., £15.50.

David Lane, The Rise and Fall of State Socialism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, 233 pp., £12.95.

Reneo Lukic & Allen Lynch, Europe from the Balkans to the Urals: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, xvii + 436 pp.

Thomas Cushman & Stjepan G. Mestrovic (eds), This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press, 1996, ix + 412 pp., $50.00 h/b, $18.95 p/b.

Derek Hall & Darrick Danta (eds), Reconstructing the Balkans. A Geography of the New Southeast Europe. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996, xx + 260 pp., £45.00.

Ajay Patnaik. Central Asia. Between Modernity and Tradition. New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1996, viii + 238 pp.

Rudolf L. Tokes, Hungary's Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change and Political Succession, 1957–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xxiii + 544 pp., £19.95.

John D. H. Downing, Internationalizing Media Theory, Transition, Power, Culture, Reflections on Media in Russia, Poland and Hungary 1980–95. London: Sage, 1996, xviii + 269 pp., £45.00 h/b, £13.95 p/b.

Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xi + 202 pp., £35.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Donald P. Steury (ed.), Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950–1983. Washington DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996, xxii + 504 pp.

R. W. Davies, Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 1931–1933. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, xviii + 612 pp., £65.00.

William Chase, Jeffrey Burds, S. V. Praslova, A. K. Sokolov & E. A. Tiurina (eds), Russian Stale Archive of the Economy: A Research Guide: I. Guide to Collections. Moscow: Blagovest, 1994, xx + 679 pp.

V. P. Butt, A. B. Murphy, N. A. Myshov & G. R. Swain (eds), The Russian Civil War. Documents from the Soviet Archives. London: Macmillan, 1996, xvii + 217 pp., £15.99.

Ilya Somin, Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996, ix + 236 pp., £21.95, $32.99.

David R. Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926–1934. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, xiv + 263 pp., £33.50 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Peter H. Solomon Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xvii + 494 pp., £55.00 h/b, £19.95 p/b.

Richard G. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, Volume III, From London to Sèvres, February‐August 1920, xx + 534 pp., and Volume IV, Between Crescent and Sickle: Partition and Sovietization, xii + 496 pp. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996. £35.00 each volume.

Ian D. Thatcher & James D. White (eds), Journal of Trotsky Studies. Glasgow: Institute of Russian & East European Studies, 1993–1996, Nos. 1–4, £10.00 (Institutions), £5.00 (Individuals).

Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren. Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror, Edited and translated by Marilyn Vogt‐Downey. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1996, xviii + 447 pp.

Leopoldina Plut‐Pregelj & Carole Rogel, Historical Dictionary of Slovenia. London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1996, xxvii + 345 pp., £63.65.     

Cops,spies and private eyes—changing patterns of Russian policing: A review article

Yevgenia Albats, KGB: State within a State. London: IB Tauris, 1995, 401 pp., £10.95.

Mikhail Boltunov, “Al'fa”—sverkhsektretnyi otryad KGB. Moscow: Kedr, 1992, 208 pp.

Martin Ebon, KGB: Death and Rebirth. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, xii + 229 pp., $24.95.

Amy Knight, Spies Without Cloaks. The KGB's Successors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996, xx+ 318 pp., £16.95.

Hsi‐Huey Liang, The Rise of the Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xiii + 345 pp., £30.00.

Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism. Crime, Culture and Power in St Petersburg, 1900–1914. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, 324 pp., £33.50.

Louise Shelley, Policing Soviet Society. The Evolution of State Control. London: Routledge, 1996, 269 pp., £14.99 p/b, £40.00 h/b.

Leonid Tokar, Sovetskaya militsiya 1918–1991. St Petersburg: Eksklyusiv, 1995, 232 pp.

J. Michael Waller, Secret Empire. The KGB in Russia Today. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1994, 390 pp., £13.50 p/b, £42.50 h/b.

Fredric Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, xiii + 345 pp., £45.00.     

Institutions, Ideology, and the Tragedy of the Commons: West Texas Groundwater Policy

West Texas is the setting for an unintended experiment in commonsresource management. Dispersed, autonomous, local groundwaterdistricts use nonregulatory strategies to promote conservationand groundwater quality. The central force driving this organizationalform appears to be ideological. West Texans seek alternativesto state management of groundwater pumping. This study useskey-informant interviews to evaluate the strength of ideologyin explaining West Texas groundwater policy and to provide atheoretical framework for discussing the importance of the "localsolution.’ Time-series data substantiate the claim thatlocal groundwater districts succeed in slowing depletion rates.     

Child witnesses and the confrontation clause

InMaryland v. Craig, the United States Supreme Court relied heavily on a brief prepared by a committee of the American Psychology-Law Society on behalf of the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA brief concluded that sexually abused children may be particularly vulnerable to distress in the legal process, especially when forced to confront the defendant face to face, and that such acute distress may be inconsistent with the state's interests in promotion of reliable testimony and child welfare. APA also argued that psychological theory and research provide foundations for individualized determination of the need for measures to protect children from face-to-face confrontation. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AFE06051 00002     

Social welfare functions when preferences are convex,strictly monotonic,and continuous

The paper shows that if the class of admissible preference orderings is restricted in a manner appropriate for economic and political models, then Arrow's impossibility theorem for social welfare functions continues to be valid. Specifically if the space of alternatives is R ₊ ⁿ , n ≥ 3, where each dimension represents a different public good and if each person's preferences are restricted to be convex, continuous, and strictly monotonic, then no social welfare function exists that satisfies unanimity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and nondictatorship.     

A Second Republic for Italy?

Radical change in the representative dimension of Italy's political system was expected to bring a transition to a 'Second Republic' in Italy. That has not happened. Nevertheless, after three consultations using the new parliamentary electoral system, studies focusing on the 'input' side of Italian politics are beginning to agree that substantial change has occurred. It is, however, too early to identify the extent of change in public administration and centre–local government relations, whilst even in parliament it is argued that consensual decision-making continued at least into the late 1990s. The impact of party system change on policy-making has thus been shown to be less direct than many expected, providing rich material for research into the relationship between institutional and policy change. Nevertheless, institutional change continues, particularly with regard to the decentralisation of government, and some studies suggest that this is the key to Italy's political transformation, rather than electoral reform or even change in the form of government. Still, the election of Italy's first right-wing majority government in 2001 may yet bring change in parliamentary practice and policy-making more generally.