Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism by Yoshiko M. HerreraReview by: Graeme P. HerdSlavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 390-391Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148631 .

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390 Slavic Review

washing machines was poor. Although the government continued to extol communal liv- ing, Attwood, in her interviews with citizens from that period, found that people retained fond memories of the joys of newly found privacy in the Khrushchev-era apartments.

Kristin Roth-Ey has written an excellent essay on the Sixth International Festival of Youth and Students held in Moscow in 1957. As Moscow opened the doors to thousands of foreigners, the state was unable to control the unprecedented rate of interactions be- tween Soviet citizens and foreigners. The authorities viewed the biracial babies born from these unregulated sexual encounters as an indication of Soviet women's promiscuity and their receptivity to foreign men. Roth-Ey sees this period as the beginning of the Soviet sexual revolution. Marianne Liljestr6m analyzes women's autobiographical texts from the 1950s and 1960s and argues that they were published primarily to educate young people. Women remembered their lives in prescribed discursive boundaries and represented them- selves as sincere, activist, and respecting authority and as witnesses to history.

John Haynes analyzes the representation of gender in the films Ballada o soldate (Bal- lad of a soldier, 1959) and Letiat zhuravli (The cranes are flying, 1957) and concludes that, not only was the image of the great all-knowing father disrupted in multiple ways, but there was greater complexity in the representation of women and a slight shift away from the essentialist nature of Soviet motherhood. Irina Paert has studied the impact of Nikita Khrushchev's antireligious campaigns on female religious orders, especially the Piukhtitsy convent in northeast Estonia. She concludes that despite the state's best efforts, women continued to engage in a variety of religious activities, both covert and overt. Sue Bridger completes the volume with an overview of the Soviet-American space race in the 1960s, and the way cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was used by the Khrushchev regime to sym- bolize the progressive gender politics of the Soviet state.

Although the collection is focused on the history of the 1950s and 1960s, it is worth mentioning that some of the phenomena described above were present in the previous decades. Thus, for example, many of the tropes in women's autobiographical literature in the Khrushchev era were present in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly the Stalinist regime used select Soviet heroines in the 1930s and 1940s to persuade an international audience of their commitment to women's liberation. These caveats aside, the volume will be of great interest to students of history and gender studies and is suitable for use in history courses at both the graduate and the undergraduate level.

CHOI CHATTERJEE

California State University, Los Angeles

Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism. By Yoshiko M. Herrera. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxvi, 288 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $75.00, hard bound.

Benedict Anderson introduced the concept of the nation as an imagined political com- munity, one that exists in the minds of its inhabitants: regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that might prevail, the nation is always envisioned in terms of a deep, hor- izontal comradeship. In this new book, Yoshiko M. Herrera takes this concept and other insights from psychology and social theory (in particular, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus) and seeks to answer a question that lies at the heart of political economy: "What are the origins of economic interests and what explains their development and influence on political action?" (1). This book ultimately concludes that variations in Russian re- gional activism, rather than being structurally determined or primordially inherent, can be explained by differences in the construction or imagination of economic interests: "ex- pressed economic interests may well be as fluid as ethnicity, and the regional economy may be as imagined as the nation" (12).

Herrera begins by noting that between 1990 and 1993, when the "parade of sover- eignties" was at its height, in only around 40 percent of the 55 Russian regions (as opposed to the "ethnic republics") was political autonomy perceived as economically advantageous

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Book Reviews 391

and in their material interest. In order to help explain this puzzling pattern of variation in autonomy and sovereignty movements, Herrera develops an imagined economies analyt- ical framework that focuses on the interactions between particular institutional contexts and local understandings-that is, the cultural and political contexts within which they arise. She derives this argument from a study of two economically similar Russian regions: Samara and Sverdlovsk. Both oblasts had no history of independent statehood; shared the same institutional and legal status, approximate territorial size, and a strongly Russian eth- nic composition (83 percent and 89 percent, respectively); enjoyed peaceful relations with the Russian center; and are indeed a similar relative distance from it.

Here the similarities end. Although there was no regional activism in Samara, Sverd- lovsk "had one of the strongest movements for greater sovereignty in the entire Federa- tion, and economic claims formed the basis of Sverdlovsk's activism" (6). Nationalism, bar- gaining strategies to extract extra resources from the center, and structural economic arguments for sovereignty do not appear to explain this disparity. Through a discourse and quantitative content analysis of over thirty local newspapers and journals, Herrera found that multiple subjective local interpretations of economic conditions shaped attitudes to- ward sovereignty more than an "objective," rational, and uncontested understanding of actual economic conditions based on quantitative data sets.

In Sverdlovsk individual and group cognition, elite manipulation, systemic framing, and institutional mediation combined to develop a shared pessimistic local view of the economy that fed into a perception of regional inequality and suggested an economic in- terest in greater sovereignty. The regional newspaper stories (over 1,441 coded local news- paper articles on Samara and Sverdlovsk) were not paid for by political and economic elites as part of ongoing information warfare to maximize factional power, but nor did they correspond to objective accounts of economic conditions in the region. Rather, Herrera argues, they were the authentic expression of local concerns and issues and so reflected the way in which local actors understood the world. They emerged as part of "a dynamic interaction between institutional context, events and interpretations of the economy in which particular understandings were activated and developed in response to certain ex- periences, and those understandings themselves became the fuel for subsequent action" (224). In other words, the stories both reflected understandings and shared beliefs and created them.

Although Soviet censorship had ended, how authentic were these stories? What is the distinction between "local voices," the Sverdlovsk public, institutions, local actors, and re- gional elites? Were not some voices more equal than others, some actors more influential than others in shaping shared beliefs? A fuller discussion of the limitations to the con- structivist political economy approach would have been useful.

The book is extremely lucid (the above quotation notwithstanding), and the innova- tive constructivist political economy approach will present a compelling analytic frame- work for many, though the link between the constructivist methodology and empirical evi- dence in my view remains unclear. Nonetheless, the imagined economies framework does have a global application, and if applied over a longer time span it will help us better un- derstand the evolving nature of economic interest formation in many secessionist move- ments, not least the Kurds in northern Iraq, Kosovans, and even the Scots.

GRAEME P. HERD Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, Switzerland

Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation. By Matthew Crosston. Post- Soviet Politics. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. viii, 152 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibli- ography. Chronology. Index. Figures. Tables. $89.95, hard bound.

Perhaps the most spectacular dimension of the process that led to the breakup of the So- viet Union was the way in which it so clearly demonstrated the weakness of the country's legal and political institutions. When Russian president Boris El'tsin issued his famed call

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