This book provides a wide-ranging overview of Russian security policy in the post-Soviet period. It concentrates in particular on the Vladimir Putin era, including the first year of Putin's “tandemocracy” with his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev. Mark Galeotti has assembled a group of prominent experts to describe and analyze Russia's internal and external security policy. As Galeotti states in the introduction, the goal is to examine Russian security “from the inside out” (p. 3), as seen from Moscow.

This goal is by and large realized. All of the authors are deeply familiar with their topics, having spent many years gathering data from the Russian press, government documents and statistics, and interviews. Galeotti does not impose a unifying theoretical framework, but several key themes, as well as some implicit debates among the contributors, do stand out.

At the domestic level, Russia's policymaking process is characterized as superpresidential, personalistic, underinstitutionalized, and opaque. Several authors note a tendency towards the “securitization” of politics, both in terms of the prominence of officials with security and military backgrounds (the so-called siloviki) under Putin and in the practice of defining multiple domestic problems as security ones as a means of curtailing political debate and oversight.

In the external security policy realm, both the Russian military and the military–industrial complex are depicted as largely unreformed and incapable of meeting twenty-first-century challenges. There seems to be some disagreement among the various authors, however, about whether Moscow is locked into a militaristic, neoimperial security strategy or whether there are countervailing tendencies toward an emphasis on economic modernization and finding a stable place for Russia in a globalizing world.

In addition to Galeotti's introductory overview and a brief but incisive afterword by Dmitri Trenin, the book consists of nine substantive chapters. Graeme Herd's chapter summarizes and analyzes the formal military and security documents adopted under Putin and Medvedev up through 2009. He highlights the tension between “globalist” and “isolationist” tendencies (p. 25) in Russian security policy, a tension that can be seen in the dominant ideological construct of the Putin era, the notion of “sovereign democracy.” The adjective is more important than the noun, meant to emphasize Russia's determination to resist outside interference in its internal affairs, but the noun speaks to a desire to be seen as part of Europe. Stephen Blank also focuses on security strategy in a jeremiad directed at what he sees as Russia's failure to overcome the pathologies of its tsarist and Soviet past. Its political system and worldview turns it into a “besieged fortress” (p. 188) that ultimately weakens Russia. This is very much a second-image account, with history, political culture, and domestic political institutions leading to an irrational and self-defeating foreign policy. Trenin's afterword holds out hope for a shift in policy toward a focus on internal economic and political modernization, and suggests that the leadership implicitly understands that the external military threat has waned, evidenced by its neglect of the armed forces for the last two decades.

Pavel Baev's chapter thoroughly catalogs the multiple problems of the Russian military, including its army, navy, air force, and strategic nuclear forces. He concludes that the military is both “unsustainable and unreformable” (p. 88), suggesting that the post-2008 reform efforts of Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov are likely to fail due to a shortage of both financing and political will. Similarly, Julian Cooper's contribution shows that the defense industrial sector, though better-off than it was in the 1990s, still faces many problems, including poor quality and high costs. Although arms sales have helped keep part of the industry afloat, the prospects for future high overseas orders are in doubt, and the capacity of the sector as a whole has dropped considerably since the 1980s. Further, despite the economic boom under Putin, the military benefited much less from higher state spending than his favored security services. This preference for spending on domestic security also suggests that the leadership understands that Russia's primary security threats are as much internal as external. The one piece of bright news for Russian external security policy from this volume may be Stephen Cimbala's conclusion that Russia could reduce its arsenal to 500–1,000 deployed nuclear warheads in arms control agreements with the United States and still maintain a secure second-strike capability.

Chapters on internal security issues also tend to emphasize continuities with the Soviet past and a failure to confront deep-seated problems. Galeotti astutely observes, in his chapter on internal security threats, that while Putin was the “security candidate” during his rise to the presidency in 1999–2000, in office he was the “insecurity president” (p. 128). Galeotti points to a deliberate hyping of internal threats as a way of justifying harsh policies, but the insecurity was not simply a matter of rhetoric; under Putin, the Russian state coped poorly with crime, organized crime, and terrorism, especially the threat emanating from the North Caucasus. Both Galeotti and C. W. Blandy, in a separate chapter on Chechnya, argue that a one-sided policy focused on repression but neglectful of root causes, such as poverty and corruption, has made the North Caucasus more, rather than less, unstable.

The two chapters not yet discussed are in some ways the most foundational because they talk about the process of security policymaking. Mark Smith emphasizes the superpresidential nature of the system, which leaves little role for other actors, such as the legislature or political parties. Bettina Renz, in a sharp chapter on civil–military relations, notes that the key problem is not so much weak civilian control over military and security bodies but a general absence of state accountability to society.

It should be emphasized that this is a book for Russianists and security specialists looking for a detailed overview of Russian security policy (those looking for a more concise and general essay on the topic should consult Thomas Gomart's Russian Civil-Military Relations: Putin's Legacy, 2008). For the most part, the authors do not engage the broader comparative politics or international relations literature, and there is no self-conscious theory development or testing. The approach is more descriptive and analytical. Although the book suffers in places from the common flaws of edited volumes, such as some repetitiveness across chapters, for the most part these problems are minimized. There are very few factual errors, some of which are almost certainly slips of the pen (such as when Galeotti writes Dagestan when he clearly means Ingushetia on page 141), although it should be noted that Russia, specifically the Kaliningrad Oblast, does in fact share a border with Poland (cf. p. 186). It is unfortunate that there is no stand-alone chapter on the August 2008 Russia-Georgia War, which receives several brief mentions but presumably came too late for a more detailed treatment.

Overall, this book demonstrates the ongoing and long-term effects of the Soviet collapse, which, as Stephen Kotkin (2001) argued persuasively in Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000, was not a moment but a decades-long process that continued after 1991. The institutional and ideational legacies of the communist experience are still reflected in the Russian security sector, which in many respects remains unreformed (albeit much smaller than its Soviet predecessor), and in the formation of Russian security policy, which continues to be set by an oligarchy facing few institutional constraints and unaccountable to the wider society.