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Reviews 223Yet, just as the Jones and Moskoff volume sheds considerable light on the essentialtensions and contradictions of earlier attempts to introduce elements of independententrepreneurship into the Soviet system of central planning (especially in thelate 1960s and early 1970s), so also it illuminates the central difficulties of transitionto a market economy in Russian conditions, difficulties that have if anything beenbrought more clearly into focus with the final jettisoning of the baggage of theSoviet era.The most general of these is the absence of a "market culture" (see chapters 6and 8). Closely allied to a petty and obstructive egalitarianism (" Ί don't want tolive like her [a rich neighbor]. I want her to live like me' "; p. 96), the culturally conditionedability to understand the role of prices, the nature and ethics of exchange,and the value of competition is making things just as difficult for Yegor Gaidar'seconomic transformation team, now at the center of power, as it did for the vulnerableand often isolated cooperatives of the perestroïka period. Entrepreneurs have,of course, often been as wanting in this basic understanding as the masses, and theproblem of the "get rich quick" mentality (reinforced by policy instability) is as criticalin the post-Soviet conditions of 1992 as it was in the period covered by Jonesand Moskoff. Partly because of these attitudinal problems, partly because of "objective"economic difficulties, the cooperatives failed to produce the kind of powerfulsupply-side response to shortages that might have started a market cultural revolution.It seemed at the time that these economic difficulties were largely a function ofthe shortcomings of central planning. The brief experience of the Yeltsin governmentin Russia suggests that they are much more deep-seated, and that the story toldin the volume under review will continue to have relevance to current preoccupationsfor longer than the authors themselves might wish.Ko-ops raises one methodological issue that is of critical importance for all socialscientists working on the Soviet and post-Soviet world. The approach is very muchthe tried and trusted "Sovietological" approach, based on massive documentation,wide use of anecdote and other forms of "significant detail," and a certain amount ofreporting for reporting's sake in the context of the general unavailability of many ofthe sources commonly used. My own feeling is that as we move into the post-Sovietworld, in which the (Russian, at least) informational dimension is converging withwhat we are used to in the West, the Sovietological approach may become largelyredundant, at least in its "pure" form. What will never become redundant is the kindof incisive comment that graces page 93, viz.:If crime becomes endemic to the movement, it will corrupt the entire process of building a civilsociety in the economic sphere; civil society implies a market culture in which there is theimplied entitlement to honesty in exchange. That does not now exist.That is as true of the transformation movement of 1992 as it was of the cooperativemovement of the late 1980s.David A. DykerSchool of European Studies, University of Sussex