Real Interests Research Articles

Capital Gains and Income Arising from Nonrenewable Resources

Should capital gains be included in income arising from nonrenewable resources? In the present paper, I show that capital gains from a nonrenewable resource can be divided into two terms: real price change effects and real interest rate change effects. By application of sectoral income theory developed by Asheim and Wei (Environ Res Econ 42:65–87, 2009), only the former term is part of real income of the resource and the latter term should not be included. This result is significant in the sense that all change in real resource wealth can be included as part of real income only if future real interest rates are assumed to be constant. Hotelling rule always implies that capital gains from nonrenewable resources coincide with real interests on resource wealth; net investment generated from the resource cancels out current cash flow from the resource; and real income comes from price change effects.

The research–policy dialectic

Since the 1980s, research has significantly improved understanding of rental housing in the Global South. This has informed, albeit sporadically, policy reports emanating from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) that are yet to be translated into policy. Policymakers continue to doggedly pursue ‘ownership’ as the preferred housing tenure; renting is viewed as exploitative—tenants are seen to be the victims of unscrupulous landlords. Of course, there are exploitative landlords but research in urban Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean finds such landlordism to be exceptional. To the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence of the contribution that rental housing makes: to enhance residential mobility, improve labour market and livelihood opportunities, accommodate gender and cultural concerns, and strengthen social and economic networks. Despite the ‘virility of research’ findings, the key question is: why are policymakers reluctant to explore the rental housing option? Is it simply because their views are based on the ‘exploitation’ myth? Is it that the perceived short-term political advantage present in the mantra of ‘ownership’ accounts for the ‘impotence of action’ in formulating a rental housing policy? Alternatively, could it be that real estate interests are so powerful that governments have lost the room for manoeuvre?

Interests, Issues, and Preferences: Women's Interests and Epiphenomena of Activism

What do we mean by “women's interests?” To consider interests requires us to consider the “real interests” of women, which “[rest] on empirically supportable and refutable hypotheses” and to examine women, “exercising choice under conditions of relative autonomy and, in particular, independently of [the constraining] power [of others] – e.g. through democratic participation” (Lukes 1984, 25, 33). Identification of interests is always a normative concern, resting on an appreciation of citizens' autonomy and deliberation—or lack thereof.

Market Distortions in Real Estate Transactions

The current commission system in real estate brokerage misaligns agent and house seller interests, so real estate agents have strong incentives to mislead their clients by convincing them to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. This paper studies, being motivated by the commission system, which types of agents are misleading which types of clients, so they need to renegotiate a better contract. We find that agents mainly mislead corporate, bank, and government clients, but not individual clients. Moreover, corporate clients are mainly misled by moderately experienced agents, while bank and government clients are mainly misled by less experienced agents. Highly experienced agents, on the other hand, mislead to the least extent on all types of clients. Greater information asymmetry leads to larger distortion on all types of clients, while greater motivation heterogeneity causes larger distortion on corporate and bank clients. We do not find evidence of agent shirking on effort.

Meta-History’s Dangerous Dream

“Big History” and “meta-history” are grounded in an ancient lamentation over the segmentation of human existence, the alienation from an original sense of oneness. In this paper I am doing my disciplinary duty by providing a deflating historical counterweight to the desire to overcome those last remaining obstacles on the path to a complete account. For me at least, the difficulties in reaching a complete account in a common language remain; nor am I persuaded that the difficulties are merely technical. The difficulties are deeply engrained not just in modern disciplinary thought but in cognition as such. Indeed, the very goal of a complete account in a common language seems to me to be based on a false view of disciplinary distinctions as well as a false understanding of what we ought to wish for, our real interests.

Minimally Conscious States, Deep Brain Stimulation, and What is Worse than Futility

The concept of futility is sometimes regarded as a cloak for medical paternalism in that it rolls together medical and value judgments. Often, despite attempts to disambiguate the concept, that is true and it can be applied in such a way as to marginalize the real interests of a patient. I suggest we replace it with a conceptual toolkit that includes physiological futility, substantial benefit (SB), and the risk of unacceptable badness (RUB) in that these concepts allow us to articulate what is at stake in ethical judgments where outcomes are crucial in determining what should be done.

Dominant Traditions in International Textbook Research and Revision

History textbooks have been a ubiquitous feature of educational practice in schools systems across the world for many centuries. Textbooks, however, do not stand as neutral entities espousing agreed or accepted “historical truths.” To the contrary, textbooks appear as powerful cultural artefacts because they contain the ideas, values, and knowledge that influential elements in society expect students to know and embrace. As Apple (1993: 46) rightly acknowledges, “Textbooks are conceived”, designed and authored by real people with real interests” and as a result the selection of textbook knowledge is an intensely political activity often leading to tension, controversy and acrimonious debates in the struggle to define “what knowledge is of most worth.”1 Traditionally history education is regarded as the vehicle through which nations seek to disseminate and reinforce narratives that define conceptions of nationhood and national identity. Contained within history textbooks, therefore, are narratives and stories that nations choose to tell about themselves, their people, and their relationships with other nations. As a consequence, to study and interrogate the content of history textbooks and how they are authored, published, and employed is an illuminating and vitally important educational enterprise.

Property Rights over Money: the Italian Perspective and English Law

Abstract The work considers money in a different way depending on whether it is used as a means of payment or for other functions. Only in the first case it comes to evidence a characteristic proprietary regime which cuts across the different categories of property by which money assets are represented. In the other cases, money should be considered simply as a fungible asset. However, rules of specification of fungibles should be reconsidered. Specifically, the paper deals with the issues arising in transactions where money is transferred to an intermediary for management. It aims to show that the transferor or the beneficiary keeps real interests in the money transferred. It argues how these interests may be relevant to Italian law, by comparing it with the English legal system. The paper demonstrates that reference to property law may be useful for evaluating the quantum of rights of the transferor of money by referring to the concept of value and by the analysis of law of mixtures under the Italian and the English law. The analysis is worked out in terms of corporeal money but argues that law reaches equivalent outcomes for incorporeal money in the field under consideration.

The Fabric of New York City’s Garment District: Architecture and Development in an Urban Cultural Landscape

The Fabric of New York City’s Garment DistrictArchitecture and Development in an Urban Cultural Landscape Andrew S. Dolkart (bio) A 1959 study of the economics of New York’s garment industry opens by asserting: Put the American woman on a subway train going from Pennsylvania Station to Times Square, and it will take her just 65 seconds to pass completely under the district that gives her the reputation of being the best-dressed woman in the world.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Map of the Garment District and vicinity in 1934, showing West 34th Street on the south, West 42nd Street on the north, Sixth Avenue to the east, and Ninth Avenue to the west. From G. W. Bromley & Company, Manhattan Land Book, 1934. Author’s collection; courtesy of the Sanborn Library, LLC. This subway train sped beneath New York City’s Garment District, an area only six blocks long, between West 35th and West 41st Streets, and three irregular-sized blocks wide, from Broadway to Ninth Avenue, centering on and, thus, often simply dubbed “Seventh Avenue” (Figure 1). Its streets are lined with skyscraper industrial lofts and office and showroom buildings, almost all of which were erected in a ten-year period following World War I (Figure 2). By the end of the 1920s, most of the ready-to-wear clothing worn by American women was manufactured and marketed in these buildings, where two-thirds of the city’s garment workers were employed. The importance of the Garment District to the history and character of New York City (and also to the national industrial economy) far exceeds its limited geographic scale. Indeed, few areas are more integral to the twentieth-century [End Page 14] history and legend of the city. Extensive research has been conducted on the labor history of the garment industry in New York, focusing in particular on the rise of garment unions. Yet virtually nothing is known about the stage on which this rich labor history took place—the physical fabric of the garment district: its distinctive architecture, the architects and builders, and the economic and social forces that shaped its development. 2 The question arises, why has a district of large-scale buildings, so important to the economic and social history of the city, been so ignored by architectural historians? In part it is because New Yorkers take these buildings for granted. They are the location of so much labor history and, for many people with roots in New York City, the place where a parent, grandparent, or other relative once worked, but not one to take guests to admire the grandeur of the city’s buildings. The names of the builders of garment lofts are largely forgotten, and few people are familiar with the architects who were responsible for most of these buildings. Yet this fascinating building stock is made even more interesting by an examination of the history that created the garment district in this location. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Aerial view of the Garment District, circa 1925, looking southeast from Eighth Avenue and West 40th Street. From B. M. Selekman et al., The Clothing and Textile Industries (1925). Author’s collection. Originally published in Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, vol. 1B, The Clothing and Textile Industries (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1925). Reprinted with permission from the Regional Plan Association. The presence of the dense mass of industrial loft buildings on the blocks north of 34th Street and west of Broadway is sometimes ascribed to the passage of New York’s comprehensive zoning law in 1916. This story of the power of zoning simplifies a far more complex and interesting story of the powerful real estate and retail interests who campaigned to remove garment factories with their largely poor and immigrant workers from streets near prestigious department stores and other high-end retailers. Storeowners feared that garment workers would scare away their affluent, primarily female clientele. The success of this campaign to restrict the location of garment factories was codified in the new zoning resolution, and speculative developers working with a small...

Why to Abolish Civil Marriage?: Family-Normativity & the Reified Legal Regulation of Family Arrangements

Why to Abolish Civil Marriage?: Family-Normativity & the Reified Legal Regulation of Family Arrangements

HOMEless: a case study of private/public inversion and the temporal–spatial exclusion faced by migrant domestic workers

This paper is a case study of the shutdown of HOME (the House for Migrant Workers' Empowerment), a cultural and service center for migrant workers. HOME was founded by the Taipei City Labor Bureau (TCLB) and subcontracted to TIWA (the Taiwan International Workers' Association) in 2002, when the Director of the TCLB was the former labor activist Zheng Cun‐qi. For migrant domestic workers, the distinction between sold‐time and free‐time (i.e. the work–rest distinction) is blurred. Most of their supposedly private reproductive activities are temporally squeezed into holidays and spatially forced into public places where they are exposed to the scrutiny of the Taiwanese. This peculiar situation of private/public inversion not only results from, but also serves to reinforce, racial discrimination and class inferiority in their workplace (i.e. the homes of their employers). I use the concept of ‘bracketing’ to describe the spatial‐temporal strategies used by migrant domestic workers against this distorted inversion. I also analyze how employers ‘counter‐bracket’ migrant worker subjects as a counter strategy. HOME once existed as a ‘surrogate home’, providing shelter for migrant workers and allowing them to retain privacy during their days off. TIWA conducted organizing‐oriented cultural and political activities to assist the migrants in forming their own community, and challenged the spatial hegemony of real estate owners in the ChungShan District. However, when Yan Shang‐luan, a well‐known feminist labor research professor, took over the directorship of the TCLB in 2004, she did not appreciate the function of HOME, and decided to close its doors. In analyzing the official rhetoric in the documents of the TCLB, I find that their decision to shut down HOME was a result of their middle‐class temporal‐spatial ‘habitus’. The shutdown became a counter‐bracket measure, which coincided with the real estate interests of the ChungShan local elites.

Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years (review)

Reviewed by: Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years Thomas Socknat (bio) Susan Armstrong-Reid and David Murray. Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years. University of Toronto Press. xiv, 482. $65.00 Today Canada enjoys an international reputation as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights, but when and why did that develop? At least part of the answer is provided by Susan Armstrong-Reid and David Murray in their book, Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years, a history of Canadian involvement in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) from 1943 to 1947 and the impact of that experience on future Canadian attitudes and policies. In essence this is a triptych - three different but linked histories: diplomatic, institutional, and social. It begins with Canada's diplomatic efforts to test what it saw as the backbone of its new foreign policy as a 'middle power,' the functional principle - the idea that 'power should be a function of a nation's ability to contribute in a given area' - by securing a leading role in the first postwar international organization. Other nations, including the United States, were suspicious of that argument and, as the authors admit, Canada's participation in UNRRA owed less to [End Page 571] the 'functional principle' than to 'characters and circumstance.' The Canadian players included External Affairs stalwarts Lester Pearson and Hume Wrong as well as less well-known figures who pressed Canada's symbolic and real interests. Other than recognition, the main Canadian goal, somewhat self-serving, was to ensure that UNRRA purchased supplies from Canada. In fact, the issue of procurement preoccupied the Canadians and in the end, as one of the major suppliers of food items, Canada viewed the UNRRA years a success. The second part of the book examines the tangled web of UNRRA bureaucratic politics as experienced by Canadian UNRRAIDS, as staff members were known. Special attention is given to a number of women determined to assert themselves in a male-dominated world: Mary McGeachy, head of the Welfare Division, 'the only woman appointed to the executive level of UNRRA,' Charity Grant, director of a displaced-persons camp, Ethel Ostry, a principal welfare officer in various camps, and two social workers named Brown: Mabel Geldard-Brown in Greece and Elizabeth Brown in Jerusalem. They all experienced first-hand the frustrations and heartbreak resulting from bureaucratic red tape and internal and external political bickering, especially as UNRRA policy regarding wartime refugees shifted from relief to repatriation. Nevertheless, their conviction that 'they were making a difference' is supported by examples. The third section is devoted to UNRRA's medical mission and especially to the work of Canadian nurses in the Middle East, Greece, Italy, Occupied Germany, and China. Although they 'never expected to have to negotiate minefields of administrative rivalry, nationalist politics, gender, and professional authority while working on the front lines with UNRRA,' the authors argue that 'Canadian UNRRA nurses constituted a female educational elite who were professionally and temperamentally predisposed to seize the opportunity of pioneering new frontiers in international nursing.' In China, where the medical task was particularly challenging, UNRRA was assisted by voluntary agencies. Here Armstrong-Reid and Murray expand their research beyond UNRRA to include the colourful and thrilling story of the Canadian contingent to the Friends Ambulance Unit's China Convoy operating throughout the country hauling medical supplies, running hospitals, and combating epidemics. While the book provides a solid, serviceable account of Canada's diplomatic manoeuvring and the sometimes tedious bureaucratic problems with UNRRA, it is in recovering the historical memories of the Canadian UNRRAIDS in the field where the book really shines. Certainly, the section on UNRRA nurses is an important addition to the historiography of nursing. The concluding chapters focus on the long-range significance for Canada of the UNRRA experience. Many of the UNRRAIDS claimed that it had changed their lives and broadened their personal and professional [End Page 572] outlook, and the authors make a strong case that 'former UNRRAIDS shaped the contours of postwar Canada as educators and as advocates for improved health care and greater social justice' as well as for a more liberal immigration policy and...

The Israel Lobbies: A Survey of the Pro-Israel Community in the United States

The influence of the pro-Israel lobby in US foreign policymaking toward the Middle East has been a subject of great interest and fierce controversy in recent years. Yet, despite being the object of a massive amount of critical scrutiny, the pro-Israel lobby remains poorly understood. All too often it is depicted as a highly organized, cohesive political actor pursuing an agenda in line with, and even determined by, Israel's right-wing Likud party. By undertaking a detailed empirical survey of the pro-Israel community in the United States, this article shows that such a view is grossly inaccurate. The pro-Israel community is neither monolithic nor a unitary actor. It is fragmented into a number of different groups, many of which disagree sharply over their understanding of Israel's real interests. In lobbying the US government for what they believe is in Israel's interests, therefore, the pro-Israel community rarely, if ever, speaks with a single voice.

Reclaiming Cairo's downtown district: Contesting the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European Quarter

This paper examines the contested spatiality within Cairo's European Quarter in relation to various heritage inventories, official urban conservation approaches, real estate activities and local peoples' interests. It explores restoration and rehabilitation within Cairo's downtown which involved pedestrianisation of public spaces and architectural conservation and adaptive reuse of belle-epoque buildings. Informal discussions and in-depth interviews were administered within the Stock Exchange Quarter with both primary stakeholders (local residents, shop owners, street vendors, urban youth) and secondary stakeholder agencies (local municipality, planners, entrepreneurs and a local NGO). Official rehabilitation has favoured more technical aspects of restoration of belle-epoque buildings for future tourism, rather than enhancing the area's socio-cultural characteristics. The prohibition against community reuse of some buildings is a major barrier to rehabilitation. The paper advocates heritage management to ...

Evolution of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association1

This article summarizes the 45‐year history of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). It describes how AREUEA was created in the mid‐1960s by a few academics interested in promoting real estate research. It tracks the Association's growth into a highly respected international association of real estate academics and researchers employed by industry and governments. The article also examines the activities of its members: officers elected, awards presented, conferences organized and scholars' contributions to its main academic publication—Real Estate Economics. The article identifies the most prolific contributors to the Journal (located both in the United States and internationally) and the impact that the Journal's publications have had on real estate research. Finally, we describe how real estate research interests have changed over time.

Blueprint for disaster: the unraveling of Chicago public housing

Blueprint for Disaster traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, D. Bradford Hunt chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's own transformation from the city's most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects' decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions - ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts - also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Rhetoric and Context in Saramago's Levantado do Chão

In his article "Rhetoric and Context in Saramago's Levantado do Chão" David Frier analyses the 1980 novel by Nobel in Literature 1998 José Saramago. The novel, as-of-yet not translated to English, Risen from the Ground, achieves its success as a key text of the Portuguese post-Revolutionary period in part through its resourceful rhetorical development of textual conventions and echoes derived from a wide range of high- and popular cultural contexts, ranging from the epic poetry of Camões's Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) of 1578, through glamorized medieval battle-scenes to popular stories and beliefs and to the Fado music of Amália Rodrigues. In each case, the material cited or alluded to is adapted and revisited from new angles, satirized, or re-appropriated from the traditionally hegemonic culture of the privileged (with what are presented here as their false claims to be representing the real interests of the Portuguese nation), to suit instead the interests and perspectives of the peasant workers of the Alentejo region who form the principal focus of the core narrative of the novel. By exploiting these wide-ranging cultural resources, Saramago's novel widens its frame of reference to effectively claim the April Revolution as a natural continuation of centuries-old Portuguese cultural traditions, while also enriching the substance of the text with a variety of voices, as opposed to the traditionally monologic practice of those Marxist-inspired texts of the classical neo-realist period under the dictatorship.

H(k)‐private information retrieval from privacy‐uncooperative queryable databases

PurposeThis paper aims to address the privacy problem associated with the use of internet search engines. The purpose of the paper is to propose and validate a set of methods and protocols to guarantee the privacy of users' queries.Design/methodology/approachIn this paperh(k)‐private information retrieval (h(k)‐PIR) is defined as a practical compromise between computational efficiency and privacy. Also presented areh(k)‐PIR protocols that can be used to query any database, which does not even need to know that the user is trying to preserve his or her privacy.FindingsThe proposed methods are able to properly protect the privacy of users' queries. When internet users apply the protocols, search engines (e.g. Google) are not able to determine unequivocally the real interests of their users. The quality of the results does decrease with the increase in privacy, but the obtained trade‐off is excellent.Practical implicationsCurrent private information retrieval (PIR) protocols suffer from two significant shortcomings: their computational complexity isO(n) wherenis the number of records in the database, which precludes their use for very large databases and web search engines; and they assume that the database server cooperates in the PIR protocol, which prevents deployment in real‐life uncooperative settings. The proposed protocols overcome both problems.Originality/valueThis is the first set of protocols that offer practical protection for the privacy of the queries that internet users submit to an internet search engine. The proposal has been implemented and it will be released to the general public soon. It will help to protect the right to privacy of millions of internet users.

Community Regeneration: An Elite or a ‘Real’ Community Space?

Identifying community interests in the processes of planning and regeneration is less than straightforward. By their very nature programmes encourage the development of particular projects, typically relying on experience from past initiatives to inform current practice. One of the difficulties for partners is juggling the need to comply with administrative demands while engaging in a meaningful way with their community. This article uses empirical evidence to examine power relations within structures of governance. It argues that current processes are unable to identify real community interests and consequently create space that favour elite interests, all of which restrain the impact of governance.

Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies by Igal Halfin (review)

REVIEWS 569 historicalscholarship(spuriousfootnotes, references, equivocations,etc.) to pass fantasy offas factand have providedinspiration fortheriseofthe extreme-right in Russia. Sincethisbookwaswritten theremains ofthetwomissing children appear to have been unearthed (thestory was carriedon thefront page ofIzvestiia, 24August 2007).The condition ofthebonesandtheir locationserveas further vindication forSlater'sversion ofevents. Nevertheless, itis doubtful thatany of thiswillsatisfy believersin hiddenconnections and supernatural forces. Conspiracytheorists need not despair:the Russian OrthodoxChurchhas rejectedtheDNA evidence,alternative histories continueto flourish on the Internet, and itshouldnotbe forgotten thattheremainsoftheroyalspaniel haveyetto be found. Department ofHistory Iain Laughlan University ofStirling Halfin, Igal. Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, igi8-ig28. Pitt Seriesin Russianand East European Studies.University of Pittsburgh Press,Pittsburgh, PA, 2007.416 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes.Index. $27.95(paperback). What could Roman Malinovskii, a notorious Bolshevik who spied forthe tsarist secret police,and Leon Trotskii, one ofthemostprominent Bolshevik leaders, haveincommon? As IgalHalfinshowsinhisnewbook,Malinovskii's trialin 1918and Trotskii's persecution in the 1920sbear remarkable resemblances ,and demonstrate how the Bolsheviks were dealingwithtreason associatedwith internalopposition.Studyingthe first post-Revolutionary decade,Halfinanalyseshow theopposition was demonizedand persecuted. He interprets this process primarily as a result ofa changing political discourse rather thanas personalstruggles within theBolshevik leadership. Remarkably, bytheend ofthedecade theterm'oppositionist' gradually evolvedfroman 'erringcomrade'who could be persuaded,to a 'wrecker'who shouldbe isolatedand purged.Thus, Halfinprovidesa new interpretation of the intra-Party struggles thatpreparedthegroundfortheGreatPurge. Halfinthoroughly explains theorigins oftheBolsheviks' harshtreatment of theopposition. He showsthattreason within theParty was regarded as most dangerous becausethosefamiliar withrevolutionary theory andpractice could lead theworking class astraymore easilythanall imperialists, fascists and White émigréscombined.Also, analysingthe Bolshevikattitudetowards oppositionists, Halfinfindsmany similarities withthe Christiantradition, wherenotthecrime, butthesoulofthedelinquent wasthefocusofattention, and evil intentions were punishedmore severely than inadvertent crimes. Allthiscreateda particular ruthlessness in theattacks againstnotonlyopen oppositionists butalso theirsympathizers. In thebook'ssixchapters Halfinchronologically tracesthedebateson the Workers' Opposition, theNew CourseDiscussionduringthelastmonths of 570 SEER, 87, 3, JULY 2OO9 Lenin's life,the emergenceof trotskyist and zinovievist 'deviations'from thePartymajority's political linein 1924to 1925,and finally, thediscussions on the UnitedOppositionin the late 1920s.He underscores thatwhereas oppositionist viewswereinitially tolerated as an acceptableexpression ofopinion ,bythelate 1920stheybecameregardedas a breachofPartydiscipline or outright 'counterrevolution'. Mostinterestingly, Halfinexamines indetailhowintra-Party struggles were interpreted at grassrootslevel.He analyses discussions on theopposition and treatment of the oppositionists' sympathizers in the PetrogradCommunist University and TomskTechnological Institute. He showsthattheposition of thecentralPartyleadership prevailedtherebecause oftheauthority ofthe CentralCommittee and the PartyCongresses, but also because the centre effectively intervened whenever theuniversity deviated politically. In theend, followers of the oppositionwere purgedfromthe institutions of higher learning, and from theParty. Carefully readingboththeleadership's resolutions and grass-roots discussionson the opposition, Halfinmakesseveralimportant pointsabout the intra-Party struggle ofthe1920s.First, he arguesthatopposition couldhardly be seenas a conceptual alternative toStalinism, butrather was 'theotherside oftheStalinist coin'(p.327).BoththeCentralCommittee and theopposition, and theirsupporters at grass-roots level,werearguing within thesame discourseand had thesameunderstanding ofthepolitical process.The oppositionists evendid notopposethepurgesin theParty, butonlystressed their unfairness. Second,he makesclearthatthecontrolof Bolshevik language, no lessthanthecontrol ofthePartyapparatus, determined thewinner. The ability oftheCentralCommittee's majority toturn publicdiscourse toitsown advantagewas decisivein stripping theopposition ofitsgrass-root support. Taken together, Halfin'sinterpretation ofthestruggle withtheintra-Party oppositionis provocative and interesting. It willnot be, however,entirely novelforthosefamiliar withhis earlierbooks,From Darkness toLight: Class, Consciousness, and Salvationin Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh,PA, 2000) and Terror inMy Soul:Communist Autobiographies onTrial(Cambridge, MA, 2003) that already contain manyofhisinsights as wellas someofthefactual information on thetreatment oftheoppositionists in thePartyand,in particular, institutionsofhigher learning. Also,Halfin'sdiscussion ofthedramaticchangeof attitude towards opposition in themid-and late 1920sis nottotally compelling .It isquitepossiblethatbecauseoftheperceived 'corruptive' influence of theNEP as wellas theexpectedideologicalmaturation oftherankand file theBolsheviks, as Halfinargues,came to rejecttheveryidea ofjustifiable internal opposition and toviewpositively theunanimity ofparty opinion.But it wouldbe interesting to knowwhythistransformation happenedexactly whenit did. Possibly, thediscursive changecannotexplainit all, and real historical agentswiththeirconcrete interests and passionsshouldnotbe left out oftheanalysis? Unfortunately, thebook underreviewis notfreefrom someirritating inaccuracies and misprints. For example,thehead of GPU, Feliks EdmundovichDzerzhinskiiis mistakenly called Jan Dzerzhiskii REVIEWS 571 (p. 109),and the'bourgeois phase' oftherevolutionary processis rendered as 'bourgeois face'(p. 181). These criticisms aside, Halfin'sbook is a valuable contribution to the history ofthepoliticalstruggles ofthe1920sthatcan be readwithbenefit by all scholars oftheperiod. Department ofForeign Languages andAreaStudies L. G. Novikova MoscowStateUniversity Baron, Nick. TheKingofKarelia:ColP. J. Woodsandthe British Intervention inNorth Russia igi8-igig: A History and Memoir.Francis Boutle, London, 2007. 345 PP- Maps. Illustrations. Chronology.Appendices.Notes. Index.£14.99(paperback). In...