Territories, Boundaries, and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. By Anssi Paasi. Belhaven Studies in Political Geography. New York: Wiley, 1996. xxi, 353 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. Photographs. Figures. Maps. $85.00, hard bound.

ated a personal bond and degree of trust between Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl. None of Gorbachev's advisers expected the revolutionary changes that occurred in eastern Europe in 1989, but they adapted quickly to them because they were consistent with the premises of "new thinking. " The good personal relationship between Gorbachev and Kohl facilitated this response and in turn allowed unification to become a real possibility. The thinking of Gorbachev and his advisers on the German question ran well ahead of most of die Soviet foreign policy establishment. Shumaker does a reasonable job of documenting his case but never really comes up with a "smoking gun" that shows Soviet willingness to accept German unification before it was all but forced on them by events. This reviewer feels more comfortable with the analyses of Archie Brown (The Gorbachev Factor, 1996) and Jacques Levesque (The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, 1997) who argue diat Gorbachev ignored the early warning signs of trouble in eastern Europe and only reacted when events got out of hand. The determining factor of Soviet policy then was not so much willingness to accept a unified Germany as it was unwillingness to use force to prevent it. Levesque argues diat Gorbachev was naive. His goal of ending the arms race was linked to a broader vision of an international system in which the two blocs would be replaced by a common European security system. Widiin such a framework, the unification of Germany was acceptable, but apart from diis framework it was a different matter. The Stern thai book also invokes ideological change to explain political change. Sternthai contends that Gorbachev and his advisers recognized diat to deal with die economic problems they inherited from Brezhnev and his immediate successors they had to loosen the party's hold and demilitarize the economy. Gorbachev gradually came to realize that this would require a complete reorganization of the government. In the process, he jettisoned a core component of Marxism-Leninism: the primacy of class conflict as die engine of history and source of interstate tensions. This ideological change paved the way for the improvement in relations with die west diat ushered in die end of the Cold War. There is nothing objectionable in the Sternthal thesis, but it is hardly new. Numerous scholars have identified "new thinking" as the principal catalysts behind Gorbachev's domestic reforms and foreign policy revolution. Many of diese scholars also recognize diat it provides a partial answer at best to die kinds of choices Gorbachev and his advisers had to make on a daily basis. New thinking needs to be combined with domestic politics, personality, and the broader structural pressures die Soviet Union and its leaders faced to make sense of these decisions. Any account of Soviet policy must also take into account the gross misconceptions Gorbachev and his advisers had of the likely consequences of the policies for the Soviet economy, eastern Europe, and the survival of die Soviet Union itself. Had Gorbachev and those around known in advance the outcome of dieir policies, it is extremely unlikely that they would have pursued them. Finally, diere is the problem of context. Gorbachev and his cadre of new thinkers did not single-handedly end die Cold War. The decline of the Cold War order had been under way for some time, as indeed, had the internal decay of die Soviet Union. They set in motion die endgame of bodi processes. To understand die possibilities open to them and die consequences of dieir decisions it is necessary to understand die context in which they operated and their at times insightful and at times imperfect understanding of it.