soviet politics and society in the 1970sby henry w. morton; rudolf l. tökés

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Page 1: Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970sby Henry W. Morton; Rudolf L. Tökés

Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s by Henry W. Morton; Rudolf L. TökésReview by: A. H. BrownThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 617-618Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4207349 .

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Page 2: Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970sby Henry W. Morton; Rudolf L. Tökés

REVIEWS 617 additional constraints imposed on him by the other Allies (principally the Americans) gathered for peace purposes in Paris throughout I9I9. Nonetheless all these constraints made of the Allied intervention in Russia anything but a private war conducted by Churchill; undoubtedly, he was the most enthusiastic opponent of the Russian Bolsheviks and would have loved to wage a private war, but the reality was different. As it was he was forced by his own Prime Minister to confine himself to aid in the form of supplies, mainly to Denikin's Whites; by the American President to impose an incomplete blockade on the Bolsheviks; and by the French to give up British involvement in Russia and divert attention and aid to the succession states.

On the other hand Dr Hovi conceived intervention as nothing but alliance-making by the new states and France. However, his conceptualiza- tion is broader than this simplification implies: he has traced the pre-condi- tions to the new French policy in Central and Eastern Europe from I9I4 and established that France was interested in counterbalancing Germany in that area by Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania even before the Bolshevik uprising in November I 917. After the Bolshevik victory and the failure of its own intervention in March I919, France was exclusively interested in the succession states and left Britain practically single-handed to aid Russian Whites. However, even this 'abandonment' of Russia to Britain was more negative than is implied; after the French failure in southern Russia, French politicians lost completely their faith in the Whites and were only prepared to make use of them for their own ends which were to build up a security system in the area against both Germany and Soviet Russia.

Both books have extensive bibliographies, indexes, contain maps and photographs, and constitute very important contributions to the problem of Allied intervention in Russia and the development of foreign relations in Eastern Europe after World War I. Gbttingen J. F. N. BRADLEY

Morton, Henry W. and T8kes, Rudolf L. (eds.). Soviet Politics and Society in the 197os. The Free Press, New York and Collier Macmillan, London, 1974. xxvi+401 pp. Notes. Index. $I2.95.

THIS Festschrift for John N. Hazard, while in no sense a comprehensive survey of Soviet politics and society in the early seventies, is a much less disparate collection of work than many publications of its type. The ten authors are all political scientists and former students of Professor Hazard at Columbia University and their studies on a number of specialist, and sometimes unfashionable, themes relate to significant contemporary politi- cal and social problems.

An interesting and substantial survey by Rudolf Tok6s of the dissident movement in the USSR is followed by Grey Hodnett on 'Technology and Social Change in Soviet Central Asia: The Politics of Cotton Growing', Barbara Wolfe Jancar on 'Women and Soviet Politics', Henry W. Morton on 'What Have the Soviet Leaders Done about the Housing Crisis?',

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Page 3: Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970sby Henry W. Morton; Rudolf L. Tökés

6i8 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Peter Juviler on 'Crime and Its Study', David Cattel on 'Comprehensive Consumer Welfare Planning in the USSR', Theodore H. Friedgut on 'Community Structure, Political Participation, and Soviet Local Govern- ment: The Case of Kutaisi', David E. Albright on 'The Soviet Model: A Development Alternative for the Third World', Paul Shoup on 'Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: Convergence and Divergence in Historical Perspective', and a final chapter by William Taubman providing a criti- que of some recent assessments of the Soviet system which he entitles 'The Change to Change in Communist Systems: Modernization, Post- modernization, and Soviet Politics'.

In his introduction, Rudolf T8kes notes that the editors of and contribu- tors to the book remain extremely cool towards the 'behavioural revolu- tion' in political science and he forcefully makes the point that 'the introduction into Soviet studies of semantic, culture-bound neologisms and intellectually barren model-building exercises have thus far produced neither the kind of new evidence nor original insight that their proponents have claimed'. Making a fairly explicit contrast with some recent Ameri- can writing on Soviet politics, Tokes observes that 'most of the essays in this volume are based on extensive field research and interviews, while the rest are based on the utilisation of unpublished and not widely used Soviet source material' and adds that the authors have tried to combine the use of new evidence with the 'selective use of modern social science techniques'.

The essays as a whole are solid and thoughtful and add significantly to knowledge of particular detailed areas of Soviet political and social life. The one essay in a somewhat different category from the others is William Taubman's concluding piece, a critique of a number of contributions to the analysis of political change in the Soviet Union which have been made in recent years by western writers. Though he treats much of the American political science literature on modernization and political development with rather more seriousness than it deserves, Taubman is well aware that many models of a 'modern' or 'developed' political system which have been set up by Western scholars are but abstractions from the American political system and are much more ethnocentric and ideological than their proponents have admitted. For him, as for several other contribu- tors to this symposium, the Soviet system appears to be one of 'bureau- cratic pluralism' which, because of its bureaucratic nature, has certain features in common with 'developed' Western systems and yet is in other respects different from them and-Western predictions of imminent Soviet transformation, degeneration or decay, notwithstanding-none the less viable. Oxford A. H. Brown

Hanson, Philip. Advertising and Socialism: A Study of the Nature and Extent of Consumer Advertising in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Macmillan, London, I974. x+ 17I pp. Appendixes. Index. 4.95.

ADVERTISING directed at the consumer in 'free market' nations like the United Kingdom and the United States has constituted for more than

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