Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's edited volume constitutes a useful introduction to important research frontiers in the analysis of postcommunist polities. The editors explicitly set the contributors the task of transcending conventional (post-)Soviet Studies and contributing to a social science analysis of formerly communist polities. Through that lens, “legacies” of the old regimes are important inasmuch as causal mechanisms can be spelled out that show their continuing relevance for the dynamic reconfiguration of politics in the region.

Philip Roeder's essay reflects this theme well. He convincingly demonstrates how the administrative shaping, if not creation, of ethnocultural regions and subpolities under communist rule set the stage for the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Not even in the Baltic republics was it pure nationalist fervor that promoted the independence movements, but a complex interaction of popular sentiments with the cumulative crafting of Soviet governance structures and elites that ultimately made even the leaders of the respective union republics embrace National Front movements. This article in exemplary ways demonstrates how long-term, cumulative institutional and social developments during the communist era left their imprint on the final episode of dramatic rupture with the fabric of a multiethnic political regime.

McFaul's causal account of postcommunist political regime diversification, by contrast, emphasizes short-term power alignments at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in ways pretty much identical to his 2002 World Politics article. It may be questioned whether this exclusive preoccupation with short-term mechanisms offers substantial explanatory insights. The author comes around to this question rather late in the essay. His discussion allows for a useful new formulation of the explanatory challenge that can be pursued in future research: How do we explain the instances of postcommunist regime formation that are not path dependent and endogenous to institutional arrangements and strategic configurations developed cumulatively over previous decades and eras of political regimes? One option is the “punctuated equilibrium” perspective implicitly subscribed to by McFaul, namely, the release of creative capacities in the struggles resulting from the collapse of the old regime. But a different perspective begs for consideration as well. Liberation from path-dependent political learning and bargaining may rather be a matter of Max Weber's proverbial “slow boring of hard boards” through incremental reform and tenacious resistance to remnants of old-system practices. They may bear fruit only with considerable delay, as evidenced by the late tremors and earthquakes that resulted in further regime changes and new political-economic strategies in countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovakia, Georgia, Ukraine, or Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s and the new millennium.

The basic message that countries emerge from path dependence only slowly can be taken away from Vladimir Popov's instructive analysis of postcommunist political-economic liberalization. Whereas structural accounts emphasizing preexisting conditions are highly effective for explaining the cross-national variance of initial policies and performance among postcommunist polities, they provide relatively little analytical leverage for illuminating subsequent economic policy moves and payoffs in these very same countries in the second half of the 1990s. At that point, the analytical focus must shift to processes of institution building and to policy choice. Neither legacies nor the alternatives of incremental or “big bang” economic reform at the inception of the reform process explain good or bad economic performance, but the institutional robustness and the substantive economic policy choices made by different configurations of policymakers in the 1990s leave an independent imprint on the economic results.

The remaining four chapters of the book employ Russia as their anchor and reference point for comparative analysis. The advantage is a more precise conceptual and empirical treatment of a limited range of observations that the authors can supply on what is arguably the economically and militarily most important postcommunist country, setting aside China for a number of reasons. The disadvantage is that the contours of other postcommunist polities recede into the background and make descriptive comparison, let alone causal analysis, more hazardous. Stoner-Weiss's article provides intriguing evidence on the centrifugal dynamics of political governance in Russia. But without a comparative analysis of federal–subnational relations in other polities, it remains ultimately unclear whether the glass of central state control in Russia is half full or half empty. Without being able to compare Russia's subnational practices of policymaking to those of other federations, it is difficult for the reader to decide whether her critique of Daniel Treisman's thesis is appropriate: that Russia's national rulers intentionally and in calculated, carefully calibrated ways delegated considerable authority to subnational power structures in order to prevent further secessions and violent conflict (cf. pp. 164–65). We do observe considerable subnational leeway in policymaking, but we do not know whether this is all that different from the practices of other federations.

Timothy Colton provides a detailed analysis of the opportunities and difficulties in bringing measures of party identification to bear on Russian electoral politics. The results, as evidenced by the regression analysis (p. 201), confirm existing research on postcommunist partisanship and electoral choice, but the article could have done more to draw out this convergence of findings. Valerie Bunce's contribution presents Russia as the “median” postcommunist polity on a number of analytical dimensions, and therefore treats the fragility of democracy, state building, and political-economic reform in Russia as indicative of mechanisms also encountered in most other postcommunist successor regimes. By treating Russia as the median case, however, she tends to overstate differences in regime trajectories in other regions of the world. For example, one might object to her characterization of East Central European transitions as “breakage, not bridging” (and pacting) between old and new elites (p. 222). Were not the communist incumbents in Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Baltic states, though not in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, eager interlocutors and even participants in the process of regime change, indeed often securing for themselves a political and economic place of respect and leverage in the postcommunist order?

The final essay by James Goldgeier and McFaul offers a detailed critique of neorealist interpretations of the post–Cold War world order, instead advancing the distinction between a core region and a periphery of countries in which core countries no longer have incentives to enforce domestic and regional political order, with the possible exception of peripheral countries geographically situated in the proximity of the core (p. 239). This perspective on international relations feeds back into comparative domestic politics with the proposition that proximity to the core is a predictor of domestic economic and political liberalization in some of those polities whose purely path-dependent trajectory would have set them on a course toward perpetuating authoritarianism and state interventionism in economics. These authors offer the plausible suggestion that this proposition even explains why Russia has adopted domestic and foreign policies that have been rather accommodating to Western interests.

Overall, After the Collapse of Communism offers an interesting menu of analytical perspectives on critical issues of postcommunist politics, but variants and components of many of the theoretically most engaging contributions have previously appeared in journals. It is therefore doubtful that the edited volume offers enough value added—whether theoretically or as a textbook synthesis of the research frontier—to attract many buyers.