The pension system of a given state is a mirror that reflects many dimensions of that state's political processes, political and social values, historical experience, and economic conditions. Had Andrea Chandler presented her analysis of Russian pension politics oriented toward those four categories or analogous ones, her study would have been much more understandable and would have made a greater contribution to our understanding of post–Soviet Russian politics. Instead, Chandler presents a mostly chronologically based account of Russian pension politics that makes a significant contribution to the subject but one that is harder to understand than it needs to be. The reader must tease out the important themes, such as democratization, from a book that is more chronological than thematic. Shocking Mother Russia is less than the sum of its valuable parts.

The first and most significant contribution of Chandler's book is demonstrating that the Russian pension crises of the post-Soviet period are not entirely due to poor economic conditions. True, economic conditions were weak, but the author convincingly argues that state institutions were even weaker.

Chandler's decision to take a state-building approach to Russian pension reform contributes greatly to our knowledge of state building in Russia in general. As the author notes, her book makes its contribution by “presenting a concrete case study of a specific problem in Russian governance” (p. 158). Especially strong are the detailed discussions of executive-legislative relations and of bureaucratic obstacles to effective pension administration that bedeviled the Russian pensioners' ability to survive shock therapy. (Shock therapy is the “shocking” of the book's title.) One entire chapter is devoted to pension reform law FZ-113, passed in 1997. The chapter explores the intricacies of executive-legislative relations so well that it stands as a very good case study of a Russian version of “how a bill becomes a law.”

Chandler presents a well-researched appreciation of the role of the Duma in pension reform during the 1990s. The Duma of that period, poorly regarded in the West, actually acted in pension matters with greater overall responsibility, she finds, than the executive branch did. But it is difficult to speak of the Duma as a coherent institution when it was riven by so many political and ideological factions, some of which did not accept the legitimacy of the post–Soviet Russian state, much less the legitimacy of other Duma factions. Therefore, it would have been valuable to supplement a discussion of the Duma as a whole with an analysis of the major political parties, such as they were, on the question of pension reform. Unfortunately, there is no such analysis. Perhaps the state-building model unduly limited this study's scope. There are a half-dozen interesting charts of party discipline voting on pension reform bills (pp. 99–104) but, maddeningly, no discussion of which parties supported or opposed proposed pension reforms. There is no strong discussion of internal debates within political parties on pension politics. Nearly completely missing is the use of voting studies data, including exit polling, that could have shed an enormous amount of light on pension politics. When one remembers that pensioners comprised a very large proportion of the 1996 presidential election vote for Gennadi Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the lack of discussion of political party pension politics is all the more regrettable.

Chandler's work on pension politics sheds new light on Soviet ideological debates in the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1920s, the Stalinist 1930s, the de-Stalinizing 1950s, and the perestroika 1980s. This discussion is an important contribution in its own right. Soviet pension legacies are of more than historical interest. The author reasonably contends that the Soviet historical experience with pensions is important in molding the post-Soviet public's support for a given pension system or reform thereof. She raises this issue most directly in the last two pages of the last chapter of the book: “Finally, pension reformers must not ignore or dismiss the attachment that people may have to the existing pension system. This fondness transcends simple material interest. Pension systems make a normative statement about what the state owes its citizens…. Perhaps the most serious problem with the capitalist approach to pension reform was that it insufficiently considered the importance of history” (p. 160). If this is indeed an important lesson of the Russian experience, then one would expect the author to explore the perceptions and values of the Russian public toward their Soviet legacy system, as well as their expectations for a new post-Soviet social pension contract. There is good exploration at the level of ideology, very good exploration at the level of policy, but hardly any exploration at the level of mass opinion or behavior. We have public opinion data, of varying quality, going back at least to the Smolensk Archives, to say nothing of perestroika and postcommunist mass polling. There is also voting data from the late 1980s onward. But these data sources are not mined in this book. Once again its significant contribution could have been even greater.

Is it fair to criticize a significant contribution to the literature because it adopts one analytic framework (in this case, state building) rather than another (such as voting behavior or public opinion analysis)? Yes, if the emphasis in the book is on a substantive policy area that requires the use of all relevant data. Even though shock therapy turned out, in the well-worn phrase, to be “all shock and no therapy,” the shock percolated throughout post–Soviet Russian politics, not just institutionally but behaviorally and normatively as well.