Reviews

R. W. Davies, ed., From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy. Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990, xx + 417 pp., £45.00.

Alastair McAuley, ed., Soviet Federalism, Nationalism and Economic Decentralisation. Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1991, ix + 214pp., £38.00.

Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990, ix + 443 pp., £27.95.

Ronald I. McKinnon, The Order of Economic Liberalization: Financial Control in the Transition to a Market Economy. Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. xii + 200 pp., £20.00. $32.00.

Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd 1917–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, xviii + 461 pp., £45.00.

David Armstrong & Erik Goldstein, eds, The End of the Cold War. London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1990. 216pp., £19.50.

Paul B. Stephan III & Boris M. Klimenko, eds, International Law and International Security: Military and Political Dimensions. A US‐Soviet Dialogue. Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991, xxii + 362 pp., $90.00.

Richard F. Staar, Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1991, xl + 352 pp., £14.95 p/b.

Robert O. Freedman, Moscow and the Middle East: Soviet Policy Since the Invasion of Afghanistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xi + 426 pp., £35.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Galia Golan, Soviet Policies in The Middle East: From World War II to Gorbachev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, ix + 319 pp., £27.50 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Brian McNair, Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media. London and New York: Routledge, 1991, x + 231 pp., £35.00.

Shams Ud Din, ed, Perestroika and the Nationality Question in the USSR. New Delhi: Vikas, 1991, xv + 145 pp., £15.95.

Ronald J. Hill & Jan Zielonka, eds, Restructuring Eastern Europe: Towards a New European Order. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 226 pp., £28.50.

Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution 1919–1953. London: Harvard University Press, 1991, v + 259 pp., £27.95 h/b.

Bartlomiej Kamiriski, The Collapse of State Socialism: the Case of Poland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, xiv + 264 pp., $39.50 h/b, $14.95 p/b.

David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti‐Politics. Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1990, xi + 279 pp. $34.95.

Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity—A Political Sociology of Working Class Democratisation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991, xii + 247 pp., $24.95.

Keith Sword, ed, The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41. London: Macmillan (in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies), 1991, xxiii + 318 pp., £45.00.

William B. Husband, Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of Soviet Textile Industry, 1917–20. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, viii + 227 pp. £25.00.     

Book Review

Radical myths and superpower relations in the 1980s

A review of Mark Kaldor, Gerard Holden, and Richard Falk (eds), The New Detente: Rethinking East‐West Relations, Verso, London, 1989.

Paul Taylor and A.J.R. Groom, Global Issues in the United Nations Framework, Basingstoke, Hampshire, The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1989.

Roger A. Coate, Unilateralism, Ideology, and US Foreign Policy: The United States in and out of UNESCO, Lynne Reinner Publishers, London, 1988.

Bary Buzan, Morten Kelstnip, Pierre Lemaitre, Elzbieta Tromer, and Ole Weaver, The European Security Order Recast: Scenarios for the Post‐Cold War Era, Pinter Publishers, London & New York, 1990, pp.x. 282, £8.95 pbk, £30 hbk.     

The right to die: state courts lead where legislatures fear to tread

The right to die may be among the most legally complex and culturally sensitive areas of civil rights to emerge in our time. The thorny issues associated with a terminally ill individual's right to self-determination, and the disposition of individuals who are incompetent to make right to die decisions for themselves, promises to keep all parties involved - health care professionals, medical ethicists, families, lawyers, judges, and state legislators -busy for some time to come. To this point, the state courts have taken the lead in the right to die debate, while the state legislatures have tended to drag their collective feet. This article lays the case law groundwork for right to die decision making, then goes on to assay the legislative responses to the issue that have been rendered in the fifty states.     

Policy failure and public support: The Iran-Contra affair and public assessment of President Reagan

The Iran-Contra affair is an example of the type of event that is expected to give rise to a rally of public opinion behind the president. However, the public's response to this event, uncharacteristically, was a sharp decrease in support for President Reagan. This case study constitutes an attempt to explore the sources of the public opinion response to foreign policy events. Statements of political elites, news coverage and commentary, and public opinion assessments are examined to test the patriotism, priming, and opinion leadership explanations of the rally phenomenon. The actions of opinion leaders appears to provide the best explanation of the differential public response to the Iran-Contra affair.