Comparative politics is a notoriously divided subfield. Among the many intellectual contests, the most persistent seems to be fought between those who emphasize regional competency (language, history, and culture) and those who emphasize general social scientific theory. It is due to this difference in approach that some will very much appreciate Zoltan Barany's book while others will not.

This is first and foremost a book that focuses upon the Russian military's political role and failed attempts at military reform. Barany's analysis of Russia's “democratic breakdown” is secondary. Fundamentally, he makes three arguments: 1) Defense reform has not occurred in postcommunist Russia due to the fact that the military leadership itself opposes it; 2) the political role of today's Russian military is incompatible with democratic politics; and 3) the shift to a “superpresidential” political system explains the increased political role of the Russian military, as well as the absence of meaningful defense reform (pp. 4–5).

Because this book is focused more upon Russian military politics than upon Russia's failed efforts at democratization, one would expect Barany to build upon past theoretical efforts within the subfield of civil–military relations. These efforts tended to focus upon two different sets of explanatory variables in explaining a military's inclination to intervene in civilian-dominated politics: 1) the relative level of military “professionalism” and/or 2) the presence/absence of societal variables that create conditions conducive to military intervention. Of all the “classic” books/articles that fall within either of these groups, Barany's focuses upon only a few outside of footnotes–most notably Timothy Colton (Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics, 1979) and Alfred Stepan (Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone, 1988).

It should, therefore, not be surprising that Barany does not build upon any of these works in constructing his own theoretical approach to civil–military relations. In an approach similar in spirit to that of Brian Taylor (Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000, 2003), Barany chooses to apply a hitherto underutilized approach derived from key ideas of the “new institutionalism.” He begins with the assumption of the historical institutionalists who argue that when “policy is being formulated or an institution is established, certain choices are made that are usually self-perpetuating” (p. 6). This “path dependence” compels analysts to focus upon “formative moments” in establishing this path. Barany points out that such moments may also lead to exactly the opposite result—“institutional decay.” He argues that postcommunist Russia has experienced three such moments leading to this decay in the previous arrangement of Soviet/Russian civil–military relations: 1) Mikhail Gorbachev's invitation to the military to actively participate in the political sphere; 2) Boris Yeltsin's acquiescence in this expanded political role for the military; and 3) Vladimir Putin's confirmation of this highly political role for the military.

I believe that comparativists who focus upon social scientific theory will not be satisfied with this theoretical explanation. In their eyes, Barany may very well appear to be saying that history matters except when formative moments occur, creating a new precedent. However, the general explanatory variable for these formative moments is missing. It is, if you will, an incomplete theory.

While the theoretical aspect of the book will leave some unsatisfied, Barany's coverage of the course of Russian civil–military politics will appeal to others. He begins with a compelling account of the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in August of 2000 to illustrate how civilian and military leaders interact with each other in today's Russia. He then proceeds to describe how they arrived at this point by examining the decay of the military from 1985 to 2006 (Chapter 2), the increasing political involvement of the military (Chapter 3), the difficulties associated with defense reform (Chapter 4), and the way that the evolution of “superpresidentialism” has led to an imbalance in the appropriate command and oversight structures, leading to a breakdown in effective civilian control of the military (Chapter 5).

Overall, Barany has done a masterful job in approaching all of these quite diverse topics. While I can find little to disagree with in his analysis, I would like to delve a bit deeper into two elements of it: 1) What is it that specifically caused the aforementioned “formative moments” in Russian civil–military relations? and, 2) if historical institutionalism can so productively be utilized to understand what has happened in Russian civil–military relations, can we look to the precommunist period to cast an ever brighter light upon the current situation?

Although Barany seems to devote Chapter 3 to answering the first question, he does not truly get to the root of it until Chapter 5. It is at that point that he describes Yeltsin's “highly personalistic control over the military” (p. 149). Indeed, he describes how Yeltsin, “played off individuals and institutions against each other” with the objective of preserving his own power (p. 149). Indeed, it is this game of divide et impera that is found at the very root of the heightened political involvement of the military. Importantly, it begins not with Yeltsin but with Gorbachev, who first resorted to this “Byzantine” game out of a concern that a strong, united military could easily derail his reform efforts based upon perestroika and glasnost. For Gorbachev, it was better to have a fractious, bickering (and consequently less threatening) military than a praetorian one. This is not a general theoretical explanation for a “formative moment” but a very specific and accurate explanation as to what appeared to happen within Soviet politics of that period.

In keeping with this focus upon the specific rather than the general, Barany writes: “One of the keys to historical institutionalism is the awareness of the given institution's past. It is not surprising, therefore, that I found that familiarity with Russia's history—not just the Communist period but reaching far beyond that—is essential to appreciating its political culture” (p. 179). Indeed, perhaps the most influential book ever written on Russian civil–military relations is none other than Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace—a book that helped to create and define modern Russia and its military. Throughout this masterpiece, we see pervasive levels of corruption, nepotism, insubordination, passionate debates over military strategy, and factionalism—all combined with an absolute and complete devotion to the Russian tsar among Russian military officers. One can not help but be astonished at the parallels with the modern, postcommunist Russian army so well described by Barany.

Why is it that both Tolstoy and Barany are so accurate in their descriptions of the Russian army? Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that Tolstoy himself rejected a “science of history.” In War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote that “[t]he deeper we go in search of causes, the more of them we find, and each cause taken singly or whole series of causes present themselves to us as equally correct in themselves, and equally false in their incapacity … to produce the event that took place” (trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky, 2007, p. 604). For Tolstoy, the isolation of variables in the search for causality can only lead to a “parsing of the whole.” The only means by which a historian or analyst can understand the outcome of historical events is by accepting that an “infinitesimal unit of observation” must be taken into account, within the context of an infinite number of such observations. Of course, such a thing cannot be done. What can be done, however, is the conceptualization of the “uniform strivings of people” as the sum of the infinite number of infinitesimal events surrounding any particular event.

To many analysts of Russian politics, it makes a great deal of sense that Tolstoy's rejection of the social scientific paradigm actually freed him to concentrate more effectively upon observing things as they really were (i.e., by examining the “dependent” variable alone). At the very least, such “pure” observation seems to have freed him from casting a potentially biased perspective onto his subject based upon preconceived theoretical notions.

It is for this reason that I think Barany's theoretical weakness is actually a strength, for he has not allowed his theory to drive his observations. Just like Tolstoy, Barany was able to accurately understand Russian civil–military relations because his theory's incompleteness gave him the freedom to observe things as they really are. In other words, he was not chained to any preconceived notions of what to expect in his analysis because his theory has no general explanatory variable.

It is perhaps the ultimate compliment to suggest that Russia's greatest writer would very much have agreed with Barany's depiction of the Russian military—and that his approach is a superior one for understanding Russian military politics.