For many western analysts, Vladimir Putin's regime is associated with the state's takeover of NTV in 2000–2003, the assassination of the columnist Anna Politkovskaia in 2006, and the frequent use of anti-terrorist legislation to curb freedom of the internet. We are mesmerized by Freedom House graphs showing post-Soviet Russia steadily sliding down the press freedom scale. The book under review represents a noble attempt to reconstruct this history in a nuanced and multidimensional way. The author, Nozima Akhrarkhodjaeva, is a new doctor of political science (2016). In her book, she zooms in on the state's manipulation strategies and misuse of the media during the presidential election campaigns of 2000 and 2008. The chosen analytical frame is the subtle distinction between competitive and hegemonic authoritarianisms. She argues that Russia's devolution from the former to the latter affected the way that mass media are being manipulated and how their content becomes biased. The author meticulously classifies various practices and strategies of manipulation and documents their changes by taking two cases, the years 2000 and 2008. To give just one example, the book demonstrates how framing the incumbent changed from representing him as “able” in 2000 to “the one who is capable of maintaining stability” in 2008, whereas framing the oppositional programs changed from critical assessment to ridicule and belittling (257).

One of the most interesting discussions in the book is how journalists themselves reflect on their relations with the state. Surprisingly, many of them emphatically deny overt pressure, manipulation, or even self-censorship. At the same time, Akhrakhodjaeva aptly diagnoses the atmosphere of uncertainty in which Putin-era media are forced to operate. The toughening rules of the game on the one hand, and the bare necessity of the media market to keep on playing this game, produces this uncertainty. For example, the state has expanded the legislative and precedential basis for prosecuting journalists for libel, hurting religious feelings, or violating the private lives of bureaucrats, but when consistently implemented, this legislation would effectively outlaw almost any journalism. The policy of cherry picking the next whipping boy makes journalists apprehensive of the fine line, separating punishable from non-punishable actions (173–78).

In spite of the many important issues addressed in this book, the author avoids the discussion that I deem to be central to the topic: the causal link between media manipulation practices and regime change. The author's research optic, honed to examine niceties of the political regime's configurations, made her inattentive to the problem of socio-political dynamics. She argues that “media manipulations … differ depending on the regime type” (258), and this traps the argument of the study into seeing the mass media on the receiving end only, deprived of agency. It is legitimate to ask; is it the change of the Russian regime that preconditioned the change in the type of media ownership (as it is shown, for example, on 251), or the other way around—the change of media ownership had critical impact upon regime change? The author's conspicuous lack of interest in continuities and developments leaves readers tantalized by the unanswered question: what is happening now, after the Ukrainian crisis?

The structure of the book raises doubts as well. It bears the indelible imprint of a PhD thesis—an excellent PhD thesis probably, but still a thesis, with its overextended analytic apparatus and literature survey. In fact, readers cannot reach the original research until well into the middle of the book, only after they beat their thorny path through the first three chapters, the first being dedicated to the theoretical accounts on hybrid regimes; the second, to electoral manipulations and the third, to instrumentalization of the media. On page 130 you are finally treated to the “Research Design,” and what is left after that is the discussion of the strategies of media manipulation in Russia, grounded on eleven interviews with journalists in Chapter 4 and the content analysis of media coverage of the presidential elections in Chapter 5. The author's passion for tables (there are fifty-eight tables in the book!) is especially exasperating. In many cases, where a simple focused narrative would do, they distract attention by the treadmill of repetitious classifications and taxonomies.