It is a great advantage of the volume under review that it retains an objective stance and manages to avoid these polemical debates. The authors are disappointed by the political condition of Russia ten years after independence, but they do not embark on a search for the guilty. In his introduction, Robert Moser explains that the goal is to view Russian experience through the lens of comparative analysis. He concludes that Russia's flawed democratization should be attributed not so much to initial conditions but to the political elite's failure to build stronger institutions.

The book is pitched at the level of an advanced undergraduate reader, and it does a good job of introducing students to the best current research on the Russian political transition. (I am assigning the book to my students this semester.) Although each chapter includes a couple of pages discussing the rise of Putin, the book was published too soon to evaluate Putin's actions once in office.

Michael McFaul's long chapter on electoral trends captures the recurring patterns of a decade of voting: a combination of a weak and volatile party system alongside fairly stable blocs of voters, for and against reform. The former element is most visible in Duma elections, but the latter shows through in presidential races. McFaul's model, which basically gives Yeltsin's democratic system a passing grade, hinges on his analysis of the 1996 presidential election as the key event in democratic consolidation.

Skeptics, the present author included, would argue that the choice in 1996 between reform and communism was an artifact created by Yeltsin's public relations men, and served to subvert rather than embody the democratic process. This has given rise to a “managed democracy” in which elections were not allowed to threaten Yeltsin's rule: a system that has been smoothly taken over by Putin.

In an argument that seems to exculpate Yeltsin, McFaul writes: “Only after Yeltsin defeated his opponents through violence in October 1993 did his government have the capacity to pursue unilaterally policies that they considered necessary for ensuring capitalism's irreversibility” (p. 29). This is questionable, since the key liberalization and privatization programs had been carried out by then.

McFaul's approach is challenged in Stephen Fish's concluding chapter, where he examines Russia in the light of democratic theory and finds it wanting. Fish attributes the “accountability deficit” to Yeltsin's “superpresidentialist” system of rule. But in Chapter 2, on the role of the legislature, Moser challenges the “super-president” sobriquet. He argues that in practice, the parliament wielded more influence than talk of super-presidentialism suggests—as exemplified by the Duma's ability to win the appointment of Yevgenny Primakov as prime minister after the August 1998 financial crisis. However, one suspects that a systematic balance sheet of the policy impact of the executive and legislative branches, respectively, during the Yeltsin era would come down overwhelmingly in favor of the presidency.

In Chapter 3, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss provides a thoughtful review of center-periphery relations. She sees the expansion of power in the hands of regional governors as the result of the chaotic erosion of federal state capacity, rather than the result of strategic bargaining between Moscow and the regions.

In Chapter 4, Yoshiko Herrera provides a clear summary and critique of the economic reform program. She judges the economic reforms rather harshly, blaming the government for unleashing the market without first building up a set of regulatory institutions. However, this begs a host of counterfactual questions—where would these good institutions come from, and who would have put them in place? What were the realistic alternatives to shock therapy? Although Herrera attributes the economic depression, corruption, and poverty on ill-conceived economic reform, one can also attribute these ills to the collapse of the Soviet economic system that preceded the desperate reforms of 1992.

Chapter 5 by Zoltan Barany addresses the oft-neglected topic of civil-military relations. He perhaps understates the extent to which the army was a pillar of the Yeltsin regime. (And just why did they back Yeltsin in 1991 and 1993?) Barany adopts the framework of a shift from a “politicized” to “professional” military, but it is not clear that this really fits the Russian case. “Depoliticization” (i.e., dismantling communist controls) had the effect of leaving the military to their own devices— meddling in wars from Moldova to Tajikistan, refusing to reform, and so on. Surely Chechnya should have been a centerpiece of this chapter, but the conflict is only mentioned in passing (pp. 197–99).

Focusing on institutions, rather than policies or political actors, is appealing, in that it enables comparison with other countries. But given the institutional confusion and fluidity that has bedeviled Russia, there is a sense that one is comparing “model” with “muddle.” The weakness of state institutions is a recurring theme, but none of the contributions (except for the regions chapter) examines the process of policy implementation per se.

The institutionalist orientation leads to a strangely bloodless account, in which the political process is stripped of agency. While many books overpersonalize the drama of Russian politics, one comes away from this volume without a real sense of who the main players were. There is little discussion of the motivation and sources of power of individuals like Yeltsin and Anatoly Chubais, and such important collective actors as the oligarchs, the mafia, the media, the workers, and so on are left out of the analysis. Both structure and agency are required for a rounded political analysis, especially when institutions are in turmoil.