REVIEWS 177 me to Jesus. They wished instead to bring their Christian religious identities togetherwith theirownJewishnessthroughtheJewishnessofJesus' Christianity ' (p. I27). 'Inmany ways, theywere not interestedin bringingJews toJesus, but in bringing the true Jesus back to the Jews from whence he originally came'(p. 128). These are fairly heterogeneous responses. We need to remember that we are dealing with relativelyvery small numbersof people, and that generalizations are intrinsically harder than with larger numbers. Most Jews in the Soviet Union remained secular and indifferentto spirituality.Moreover, by the I98os, in contrastto the previoustwo decades, conversiontoJudaism had become a real option in the USSR (albeit not an easy one). It would be interestingto place Kornblatt'sstudyalongside an analysisof the comparable experience of Soviet and RussianJews who discoveredand adoptedJudaism (includingsome relativelywell-knowndissidentssuch as JosifBegun). Kornblatt'sis a valuable analysis,but perhapsraisesas many questionsas it answers. The potential role of Russian Jewish Christians is evidently enormous: 'Their special status as doubly heirs to God's chosen people bestows upon them a new mission, a positive and internal role to play within the Church: that of healer' (p. I39). This is an exciting and challenging prospect at a time when ecumenism and interfaith dialogue are becoming ever more problematic. At the same time, the position of these Jewish Christiansremains ambiguous, the product of 'discontinuityand disruption'; the fulfillingofJews asJews through Christianity'a Soviet, but also, oddly, a very Jewish irony' (p. I6). As the title of Kornblatt's book reminds us, the whole subjectis in importantways 'not aboutJews, nor about Christians,but about the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the Soviet intelligentsia'(p. 80), and one more example from the still under-researched gamut of specific and peculiar products of the interplay between institutional Marxism-Leninism and religion. Keston Institute PHILIP WALTERS Oxford Brown, Archie (ed.). TheDemiseof Marxism-Leninism in Russia.St Antony's Series. Palgrave,Basingstokeand New York,2004. xvi + 233 pp. Glossary .Notes. Index. 1i7.99 (paperback). THE DEMISEOF MARXISM-LENINISM is effectively the second edition of New Thinking in SovietPolitics,also edited by Archie Brown, and published by Macmillan in I992 from conference papers that were originallypresented at the I990 Harrogate ICCEES congress. Some of the chapters from the first edition are published in the new volume without any substantive revision because their authors have unfortunately passed away since the original publication. Others have been rewritten substantially, and one is a new addition to the volume. This mixture of the old, revised and the new makes for a strange volume. Inevitably there is some unevenness between chapters as some fill out the historical record more than others can. There is also a question about how well the essays both old and new addressthe title of the I78 SEER, 84, I, 2006 volume. Analysing the demise of Marxism-Leninismis a more complex task than recording new thinking in some policy area or other. This is not to say that the chapters are not good, but that the usefulnessof the volume is to be found in the individualchapters,which are well-written,clear and sometimes very comprehensivesurveysof changes in thinking. The chapters that are least changed from the original volume because of the death of their authorsare Alec Nove's chapter on new thinkingabout the Soviet economy, and two chapters by Alexander Dallin on new thinking in Soviet foreignpolicy and on the development of thinkingon world Communism . Dallin's chapters have stood the test of time better than Nove's. Nove's chapter is greatfun to read, writtenwith brio and full of anecdotes. However, its coverage ends in the summer of I990; it does not cover even some of the major developments in economic thinking that came at the end of the perestroika period such as the Shatalin plan, let alone the major shifts in economic thinking that came with shock therapy and the debates that surroundedit. Dallin's chaptersbenefit from the fact that the shift in foreign policy thinking under Gorbachev was more or less complete by the time he wrote his chapter, and the abandonment of the grosser aims of propagating world Communism by the USSR was one of the more clear examples of basic Marxist-Leninistprinciplesbeing sidelined. Substantiallyrevised chapters are provided by Brown his...