Reviews

Susan Gross Solomon (ed.), Beyond Sovietology: Essays in Politics and History. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 254 pp., £38.00.

Alice H. Amsden, Jacek Kochanowicz & Lance Taylor, The Market Meets Its Match. Restructuring the Economics of Eastern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 250 pp.

Robert E. Ebel, Energy Choices in Russia. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1994, xii + 152 pp., $16.95.

Michael Waller, The End of the Communist Power Monopoly. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, viii + 287 pp., £35.00 h/b., £9.99 p/b.

Minxin Pei, From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 253 pp., £29.95.

William G. Rosenberg & Lewis H. Siegelbaum (eds), Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialisation. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xix + 296 pp., £12.99 p/b.

Taras Kuzio & Andrew Wilson, Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence. Basingstoke: Macmil‐lan Press, 1994, xiv + 260 pp., £40.00.

Russell F. Farnen (ed.), Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity. Cross National and Comparative Perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 1994, xiv + 538 pp., £49.95.

Edwin Thomas Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light of Archives. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994, xii + 190 pp.

Robert S. Ross, China, the United States and the Soviet Union: Tripolarity and Policy Making in the Cold War. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993, x + 204 pp., £42.00.     

Perception of risks associated with economic sanctions: the case of Russian manufacturing

This paper is focused on assessing the risk factors for Russian manufacturing firms posed by sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU, US, and other countries in 2014. While there is an extensive literature assessing the successes and failures of international sanctions on the economies of both those imposing and targeted by sanctions on a macroeconomic level, we are more interested in trying to understand the corporate response – i.e. which firms evaluate the introduction and increasing scale of economic sanctions as a threat to their corporate strategy, and their possible reactions aimed at adjusting to a changing environment due to the geopolitical shock. Our research, based on a recent survey of manufacturing companies, provides evidence that over the last decade Russian manufacturing firms have become much more integrated into the global economy than is commonly assumed, through foreign direct investment, foreign trade (including imports of both technological equipment and raw materials and components), international partnerships, and by extensively supplying foreign companies that operate in Russia. Considering the self-selection effect of the top-performing firms in terms of foreign trade, we can state that sanctions could prove most harmful not only for the targeted firms, but for the entire population of better-performing and globalized firms involved in foreign trade with the EU and Ukraine. Thus, the impact of the sanctions on the prospects of the Russian manufacturing sector may be very strong over the medium-to-long term.     

The price of everything and the value of nothing? Unravelling the workings of Russia's ‘virtual economy’

The unprecedented reliance on non-monetary exchange (NME) in transactions among industrial enterprises is one of the most remarkable features of Russia's post-Soviet economic transformation. This paper argues that firms engage in NME in order to discount nominal prices which remain well above market-clearing levels. The mechanisms which prevent a convergence between formal and actual transaction values include asset valuation rules, depreciation schedules, tax regulations and an inadequate bankruptcy mechanism. These distortions to the price-formation mechanism effectively operate to sustain a subsidy regime which has hitherto shielded much of Russian industry from the rigours of the market. The analysis concludes with an examination of the 1998 financial collapse, arguing that the crash was rooted in the breakdown of the subsidy system just described, a process which was strikingly similar to the breakdown of the Soviet economic system a decade earlier.     

Reviews

Roger Manser, Failed Transitions: The Eastern European Economy and Environment since the Fall of Communism. New York: The New Press, 1993, ix + 195 pp., $22.95. UK edition, The Squandered Dividend: The Free Market and the Environment in Eastern Europe. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd, 1993.

Jacques Nagels, La tiers‐mondisation de l'ex‐URSS? Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1993.

John Murray, The Russian Press from Brezhnev to Yeltsin: Behind the Paper Curtain. Aldershot, Hants: Edward Elgar, 1994, viii + 280 pp.

James D. White, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. A Short History. London: Edward Arnold, 1994, viii + 312 pp., £12.99 p/b.     

Peasant farming in Russia

Russia started its decollectivisation effort in earnest after the abortive 1991 coup attempt. A legislative foundation has been laid and over one‐quarter million peasant farms have been created, many through the act of exiting a collective by a farm worker, taking his or her land and asset shares along. Yet significant obstacles remain in the path of both continued peasant farm creation and the viability of those already functioning.