Reviews

Anders Aslund & Richard Layard, eds, Changing the Economic System. London, Pinter Publishers: 1993, xviii + 237pp., £35.00.

János Mátyás Kova?s & Marton Tardos, eds, Reform and Transformation in Eastern Europe: Soviet‐type Economics on the Threshold of Change. London: Routledge, 1992, xix + 345 pp.

Peter J. Boettke, Why Perestroika Failed: The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transition. London: Routledge, 1993, viii + 199 pp., £35.00

John Flemming & J. M. C. Rollo, eds, Trade, Payments and Adjustment in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs and EBRD, 1992, vii + 242 pp., £11.95 p/b.

Zoltan J. Acs & David B. Audretsch, eds, Small Firms and Entrepreneurship. An East‐West Perspective. Cambridge: CUP, 1993, 240 pp., £30.00, $49.95.

Alex Pravda, ed., The End of the Outer Empire: Soviet‐East European Relations in Transition, 1985–90. London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1992, x + 238 pp., £35.00 h/b

Leonid Gozman & Alexander Etkind, The Psychology of Post‐Totalitarianism in Russia Trans. Roger Clarke. London: Centre for Research into Communist Economies, 1992, 121 pp., p/b £6.50.

F. J. M. Feldbrugge, ed., The Emancipation of Soviet Law. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1992, xvii + 272 pp., £76.00. $146.00

John Massey Stewart, ed. The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies and Politics. Cambridge: CUP, 1992, xv + 246 pp., £40.00, $64.95.

I. Kon & J. Riordan, eds, Sex and Russian Society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, viii + 168 pp., £35.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Kenneth C. Farmer, The Soviet Administrative Elite. New York: Praeger, 1992, xii + 296 pp., £39.95.

Robert Service, ed. Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution. New York: St Martin's Press, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992. Published in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, in their series Studies in Russia and East Europe. 199 pp., + index. £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.     

Reassessing the “freshman effect”: The voting bloc alignment of new justices on the United States Supreme Court, 1921–90

Part of the conventional wisdom about the United States Supreme Court is the presumed existence of a freshman effect, a distinct pattern of behavior thought to be associated with newly appointed justices. Among other things, freshman justices are thought to be less likely than their senior colleagues to vote with established ideological blocs on the Court. The empirical evidence for the freshman effect in voting on the Court is somewhat ambiguous, however. In order to test for a freshman effect in the voting behavior of new justices on the Supreme Court, we examined the behavior of all justices on the Court between 1921 and 1990. Voting blocs were determined from the justices' interagreement scores, using the widely employed criterion developed by Sprague (1968). We found no evidence of a freshman effect during the time frame under study. Freshman justices do not differ from their senior colleagues with respect to bloc voting. We conclude that the freshman effect hypothesis is erroneous, at least with respect to the supposed nonalignment behavior of neophyte justices.     

EXPORTING AMERICAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE TO RUSSIA

The failure of US initiatives to build local/regional economic development capacity in Russia following the fall of Communism has been partly blamed on national factors, Russian culture, and American consultants. Much of the failure, however, probably resulted because American approaches to economic development—‐highly successful in other contexts—could not work during Russia's transition from a command economy to its current state. Such things as promoting entrepreneurship, developing public‐private partnerships, creating a market economy, accessing start‐up capital, attracting foreign investment, overcoming bureaucratic corruption and high taxation, working within the rule of law, and negating organized crime either should not have been done, or could not have been done, leaving many of our programs ineffective. We ask whether the Russian deviations from the U.S. model have any implications for the current situation facing state and local development policy in the U.S.     

Positive identification of the principal component of a white powder as scopolamine by quantitative one-dimensional and two-dimensional NMR techniques

An unidentified white powder collected as evidence in an intelligence investigation was characterized exclusively by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis. A small fraction of the powder dissolved in D2O was subjected to a series of one- and two-dimensional techniques which were used to elucidate the molecular structure of the powder's major component and positively identify it as the scopolamine biotoxin. Quantitative one-dimensional experiments identified individual proton and carbon atom sites, and conventional 14N spectroscopy detected a single nitrogen atom site. Heteronuclear single quantum coherence data correlated all protons to their directly bonded carbon atom, and together with the quantitative spectra, were used to determine the number of protons directly bonded to each carbon atom. The presence of a methyl, carboxyl, and a benzyl group was also identified from these data. Correlation spectroscopy detected a three proton and a nine proton JH,H network, representing a CH2CH moiety and seven carbon atom ring, respectively. These five elements were assembled into an almost complete molecular structure by using long-range, J-coupled, 1H-13C pairs detected by heteronuclear multiple bond correlation (HMBC) spectroscopy and 1H-1H dipolar-coupled pairs found from nuclear Overhauser effect spectroscopy (NOESY) data. Additional oxygen atom sites were inferred from 1H-13C correlation intensities in the HMBC spectra along with 1H and 13C chemical shift values, or directly from NOESY correlations. Only a single oxygen atom site could not be inferred from NMR data, but its presence was inferred from comparisons to target analyte structures to complete the structure of the scopolamine molecule. To confirm these results, an ethanol/H2O solution of the powder was analyzed by direct infusion into an ion trap mass spectrometer. A prominent base signal was observed at m/z 304.1 amu, corresponding to the protonated molecular ion of scopolamine. Subsequently, the ion was selected and subjected to collision-induced dissociation, producing characteristic major MS/MS fragments at m/z 138.1 and 156.1. Comparisons of 1H and 13C chemical shift values and JH,H values measured from our NMR data were found to agree very favorably with previously reported values for scopolamine in D2O.