This is a revisionist book. Jonathan Weiler breaks with the fundamentally positive vision of post-Soviet “reform and democratization” that prevailed among Western analysts of Russia during perestroika and the Yeltsin years, and still dominates American and European governments' policy.

Weiler asserts that “politically motivated violations are comparatively low in contemporary Russia,” and does not dispute the characterization of Russia as a democracy (pp. 3, 21). He focuses instead on the less examined human rights violations “that arise from the effects of political processes and policies” (p. 4), indirectly. In five chapters he examines abuses in prisons, against women (including domestic violence), orphans, ethnic Caucasians, and other “dark-skinned” outsiders, and against military conscripts, as well as the results of the two Chechnya wars. How we should categorize these in relation to other abuses is an issue on which contemporary debate lacks clarity, and Weiler does not really address the issue. But his book has great value in highlighting the magnitude of these side effects of “democracy and reform.”

Weiler sees clearly that one of the primary reasons for infringement of Russians' rights is the weakness of the state. And he is right to see privatization, decline of state share of GNP, and (perhaps) decentralization as factors weakening it. He displays a keen perception of Russian reality in defining “the mantra of contemporary Russian reform” as “anything goes” (p. 76). The result, in a wonderful phrase, is “microtyrannies” (pp. 14 and passim) throughout Russian society. I wished that Weiler had followed up this brilliant suggestion: “The violence that accompanies much of this corruption may be … an attempt to justify the perverseness of the situation: if the victim of corruption is rendered subhuman, the act becomes easier to justify” (p. 100). This insight might have been explored further. Are the microtyrannies ultimately divorced from politics? Perhaps the narrow elites that seized public resources during privatization encourage, consciously or subconsciously, anarchy and exploitation among ordinary citizens in order to keep the citizens who are nominally masters of the system passive and demoralized. Although it would be difficult to bring systematic evidence to bear for or against such an interpretation, dedovshchina (brutalization of younger conscripts or, as Weiler notes, orphans and prisoners, by the older or fiercer ones), well described by the author, seems to have functioned this way in the Soviet system. In any case, all the conditions he describes exist because of the fundamental powerlessness of Russian citizens.

Human Rights in Russia does have significant defects. The important chapter on the Chechnya wars seems less informed than the others. Weiler ends his book by comparing Russian human rights with conditions elsewhere, broadening into a critique of neoliberalism. Such comparisons are important but difficult; neither the author nor this reviewer knows all the relevant comparisons equally well. All Weiler's examples are drawn from Latin America, which is appropriate as an area where the state has often become the instrument of private interests and has also empowered informal armed groups to carry out state agendas. There is, however, a crucial contrast. In Russia, a strong state changed quickly into a weak state. In Latin America, most of the postcolonial states were always weak. Therefore it is far more plausible in Russia that neoliberalism greatly weakened the state to the detriment of human rights.

To understand this change in Russia, which was not anticipated by political scientists, it would also be necessary to explore the elements of weakness in the communist state. In a brief review, I can mention only how the state was penetrated and used by a “private” organization, the apparatus of the Communist Party. In general, the communist past tends to be discounted as a cause of human rights conditions by Weiler (see pp. 117, 127, 127, 130). About Chechnya, for example, he concludes: “These [dire consequences] do not flow ineluctably from the deformities of Soviet communism (though, of course, those play a part) or from defects in the Russian character. Rather there has been a confluence of social, economic and political forces that are not unique to Russia” (pp. 117–18). Of course, Weiler tends to minimize Soviet factors to counter the sometimes shameless extenuation of Russian abuses by its recent past. The trigger for the two Chechnya wars was its secession, something strictly post-Soviet. But is it right to consider post-Soviet causes more important than Soviet? The use of a Russian city the size of Trenton, New Jersey, as a free fire zone for artillery, bombers, and missiles would, I think, be impossible without the Leninist tradition of overcoming morality and, as Nathan Leites showed long ago (A Study of Bolshevism [1953]), a sentimentality they conceived as endemic to Russian culture. Likewise, the general treatment of Chechens and Caucasians is hard to imagine without the Soviet tradition of isolating and stigmatizing groups such as Kulaks, Jews, and “bourgeois nationalists,” that is, members of the non-Russian nationalities.

Finally, the footnotes and bibliography give an odd impression. Although Weiler seems to know Russia well, there are few sources, beyond the many interviews, in Russian—as though a Russian fact or sentiment does not become a datum for scientific collection until it has been registered by the ponderous apparatus of international elite metaexperience. To rely on the international and scientific community accords with the equally current belief that area studies is a rusty survival. But does it not invite the very perversion of understanding that Weiler so well criticizes in the neoliberal approach to Russia during the 1990s? We took for granted the neoliberal “Washington consensus” as a way of reform valid in general, one that spared us the need to weigh carefully the distinctive circumstances of the former Soviet Union. In retrospect, we were postulating an ideology that blinded us to experience. We were acting, in fact, just like the Soviet advisors to Ethiopia in the seventies who advised, oblivious of their own experience for 40 years, that collective farms would improve Ethiopian agriculture. At a moment in human history when the apparatus for collecting, weighing, transmuting, testing, and theorizing information is vaster than ever before, we still need to plunge as deeply as we can into the things themselves.