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Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience. By Sarah Ashwin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Dist. St. Martin's Press, xii, 202 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $69.95, hard bound.

Russia's new inequalities are reflected starkly in decile ratios and Gini coefficients. While age, sex, economic branch, regional, and other divisions contribute to them, it is in differences within, rather than between, such large categories, in "intragroup" rather than "intergroup" variation, that Clarke—along with other analysts—finds the main sources of inequality. These are primarily "firm-specific": some plants/organizations can and do pay decent wages, others—in the same region, in the same branch or sector of the economy— cannot or do not. These "differences in the wage levels of comparable occupations in the same location" (46) still bulk large—limiting the potential impact of broader reforms on income inequalities. It will, in all likelihood, still pay to be "lucky" in this firm-specific sense in Russia for a long time to come. This, then, is a portrait of social and economic upheaval: upheaval that has destroyed most of the institutional and much of the attitudinal baggage of the Soviet period in the world of work, but it has not yielded a new one in the manner of east central Europe. Managers, workers, and employees are still in some sense caught between two worlds (a different matter than being "in transition") with no real assurance of an eventual landing on the shores of a more civilized market. Rich in documentation and precise in analysis, its prose somewhat labored, this volume will nonetheless engage the labor specialist and inform the interested Russian generalist as well.