REVIEWS 777 not have been silly if the Russian authorities had been as fully in control of economic developments, and as thoroughly engaged in pursuing misguided economic strategy,as Hough claims.Incidentally,he ought to have saidmore about the Clinton Administration's badgering of the IMF to lend to the Russian Government against its betterjudgement. The Administrationhad the notion of thus buying Russia'sacquiescence in the eastwardexpansion of NATO, which was sought partlybecause of Madeleine Albright'sCold War mentality at the State Department and partly in pursuitof the Polishvote in Illinois(likethe Cuban vote in Florida). Hough's story ends in autumn 1999, in some bewilderment. The previous year's financial debacle, supposedly signalling 'the final collapse' of the government's reform strategy, had been followed instead by an upturn in national output, as well as by successfulcontainment of the inflationaryshock from devaluation. Still, 'AugustI998 involvedthe end of hope of foreignloans or investment' (P. 228). Wrong again. Aside from the notoriously short memories of capital marketsand entrepreneurs,many western investorswho bought Russian government debt before the I998 crash and held it through the subsequent three years will have made 50 per cent or more on their money. If Mr Hough should in due course feel like updating his account of Russian economic policy, he should recruit a co-author to handle the areas outside his own competence. Christ Church College, Oxford P. M. OPPENHEIMER Rutland, Peter (ed.). Business andtheStatein Contemporagy Russia.The John M. Olin Critical Issues Series. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, and Oxford, 200I. Xii + 191 pp. Notes. Index. [15.50 (paperback). 'ENRON-ITIs' is gripping the corporate world. It signifiesmuch more than the terminalconsequences of a lackof accountingtransparencyfortheseventh largest corporation in the US. It speaks to the criminogenic tendencies of corporate capitalism as a whole. In that sense there is nothing new here, although the popular realization of this has produced profound shocks. The previously unthinkable has now become a commonplace, namely, that corporatecrime is endemic to capitalismas a system.What is new, historically speaking, is that the system is now global. In the West, reputationaldamage resultsfromcorporatemisdemeanour.This bringswith it formsof accountability , to stockholders, regulators, customers, rarely to employees but just occasionally,to the criminaljustice system. In the formerSoviet states,a fusionhas occurredbetween organizedcrime, organizationsset up with deliberatecriminalintent, and corporatecrime, the pursuitof so-called legitimate businessends by illegitimate means. Here, the authoritieseither do not care to or are powerless to control the new business elites of 'oligarchs'.Concepts of good corporategovernance and accountability are to say the least, vestigial. How then do we analyse the dynamics of a newly emergent capitalist system in which criminality is fused into its very molecular composition? In BusinessandtheStatein Contemporay Russia,Peter Rutland and his colleagues have set themselvesa formidabletask.Achieving 778 SEER, 8o, 4, 2002 it in less than two hundred pages is perhaps impossible. Nevertheless, this compact volume of essays provides a wealth of information and insight into the Russia of the late I99os,just at the point of accession of Vladimir Putin. The picture which emerges is uniformly depressing and for specialists in transitionstudies,doubtlesswholly familiar. As the Preface rightlyclaims, this volume is not definitive.Rather it offers 'snapshotsof the embryonic formations that are emerging from the ruins of Soviet Centralplanning and one-partyrule. In the absence of rule of law and open marketcompetition, the interplaybetween politicalpowerand economic transactionsis the key' (p. xii). In Rutland'soverviewcontributionand in that of David Lane on the Russian oil industry, the thematic is 'chaos' in which democratictheoryand expositionsof principlesof classicaleconomics seem to have little explanatory power in a shifting world of winners and losers, temporary alliances, powerful lobbies and political expediencies. Donald N. Jensen's chapteron 'How Russia is Ruled' is as close to the insiderview as it is possible to get. As second secretaryat the US embassy in Moscow and associatedirectorof RFE/RL we can assumehe has had accessto information resourcesthat are not routinely available to most academics. His thirty-page exposition of the governance of Russia is a briskcapsule of ongoing systemic crisis.LauraBelin and her colleagues provide an equallyunhappyview of the Russian media, a saga which has had important new chapters in the most recent period, surpassing even the lows of...