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how the actual set of relations in place in the post-Soviet economy would turn the state's principal instrument for insuring industrial peace-a European-style tripartite commission, on which government, organized management and organized labor are equally represented-into a strange caricature of its corporatist counterparts abroad. Rather than government mediation of labor-management conflicts, the Russian case would feature labor-management collaboration to shake down subsidies from the state, thus securing labor peace in the short run by mortgaging the future. As a consequence, if and when the reform's other shoe-widespread bankruptcy and massive unemployment-finally drops, the inadequate system of supports that now exists for those furloughed will be completely overwhelmed. Since this book went to press shortly after the violent end of Russia's first republic, it contains very little information on the constitutional and political order that have emerged in the second one, a shortcoming made the worse by the absence of a chapter on the executive. Moreover, some of the "facts" recounted in this regard are erroneous. For instance, the state duma is said to consist of 400 seats rather than 450, while Aleksandr Zhirinovskii is reported to have been banned from participation in the December 1993 election. Other slips are apparent too. Demokraticheskaia Rossiia is consistently shortened to "DemRossii" instead of "DemRossiia," while two different sets of figures on economic contraction in 1992 are supplied by Spagat and Sergei Khrushchev in their respective chapters. A good-guys-versus-bad-guys mentality also mars some of the scholarship, as when communists, but not "democrats," are associated with organized crime and when we learn that "the confrontation between progressive and reactionary forces that culminated in the siege of the White House can be seen as a breakthrough for democratic institutions and processes." This book could be of use as a topical supplementary text for undergraduate courses in Russian politics. While it might not amount to required reading for scholars in the field, much can be learned from some of the individual chapters, while its overall theme reminds us that prudence in our area of study may well mean anticipating the unexpected.

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Albert Speer is frequently viewed the most sympathetically of the twenty-two defendants at the 1945-46 Nuremberg trial, where he acknowledged responsibility  for Nazi war crimes and was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Speer's efforts at public rehabilitation are contradicted by his clear distinction between  responsibility and guilt. By accepting responsibility, while denying guilt, Speer avoided the hangman's noose, thus rationalizing the salient crime of the century the Holocaust. Speer's example stands as a warning for the future that others may similarly reject moral and legal culpability for their involvement in destroying human beings.