The Soviet Household under the Old Regime: Economic Conditions and Behavior in the 1970s. By Gur Ofer and Aaron Vinokur. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xviii, 396 pp. Index. Appendix. References. Tables. Hard bound.

cates, the papers focus on the so-called implicit social contract betwen regime and population in state-socialist societies, on the nexus of wages and employment, the impact of price control, health care and social policy. Jan Adam provides a succinct and persuasive restatement of the implicit social contract hypothesis. He explains how the individual components of the "contract" came into being and how they developed in the different countries of the region. In this he goes beyond the restricted confines of the rest of the book. He then goes on to discuss some of the problems caused by the contract. Here I believe he is mistaken; in the USSR at least, the "contract" was perceived as unsatisfactory by both regime and working class much earlier than Adam suggests. Indeed, the proposition that both sides had reneged on the original contract and were in the process of searching for a new agreement provides a thought-provoking framework in which to locate the history of Soviet social policy in the 1980s. Nevertheless, Adam's discussion provides a stimulating introduction to the issues and will certainly appear on my students' reading lists for the next few years. The papers on the USSR and Poland also contain much that is new and helpful— as one would expect from their authors. I will certainly give them to students to read; and other specialists will learn much from them. But, at the end of the day they are unsatisfactory. This is not the fault of the authors; it is a reflection of the genesis of the book and of the radical political changes that have taken place in the region in the last three or four years. The book started life as a panel at the 1989 meeting of the AAASS. At that time, there was no indication that there would be a coup in the USSR in August 1991 or that the Soviet state would collapse. The political structure and future of Poland was also still unclear. As a result, the papers are conceived on the basis of mistaken assumptions about the nature of the political environment and prospects for economic development. Although for the most part they describe the recent past rather than focus on a non-existent future, they are written as contributions to economic and social analysis rather than as recent history. In some way that I am unable to identify clearly, this affects the credibility of authorial judgements. The papers on Hungary do not suffer from this weakness. Neither Ferge nor Timar attended the 1989 meetings in Chicago; they were invited to contribute to the collection subsequently so as to provide a broader perspective. As a result, their papers were written later—after the change of regime in Hungary. It may also be significant that the authors of both Hungarian papers still live and work in the country; they are still intimately involved with the politics of social and labor market policy in Budapest. The authors of all the other papers live in the United States of America. Inevitably, they are not in such close contact with current politics; their focus is more academic.