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Russia's Youth and Its Culture: A Nation's Constructors and Constructed. By Hilary Pilkington. New York: Routledge, 1994. xiv, 358 pp. Index. Figures. Photos. $69.95, hard bound; $19.95, paper.

Laird's central focus is the accelerating collapse of the Soviet Union. In part 1 he describes this disintegration and the birth of newly independent states; in part 2 he provides a huge reference section which traces public opinion on poverty, food, healthcare, crime, strikes, agrarian reform and political change. This is similar to an appendix which provides, without discussion, results of opinion polls in the USSR, especially since 1990. Undergraduates will find this useful. Laird argues that the main determinant of the USSR's demise was "the devastating deterioration of the economy, especially the quality of human life." This adversely affected people's mental health and psychological make-up, exascerbating fears of famine and catastrophe. He believes that "ever-deepening social, political, and economic crises" brought "a new kind of terror to the Union." Political developments were affected by how the Soviet mind-set reacted to the surrounding crises. A slight analytic tension, however, is evident in Laird's work, since he readily refers to "the Soviet mind-set" yet is aware of varying views—a heterogeneity which implicitly challenges the uniformity in "the." References to "the Soviet mind-set" deny analytic space for competing interpretations in an ideologically divided society. Laird could have avoided this conceptual tangle by distinguishing between common tendencies within political culture and political viewpoints.