This book comes under a promising title, making the readers expect a structural account of Russia's transformation during the last century. Indeed, many points in the book are well taken. One of them is the argument of the inherently incomplete democratic regime of governance (42), which is valid for all democracies in the world. Yet when it comes to Russia, this incompleteness can be juxtaposed with the deficiency of Russian nationalism that, in Foley's opinion, lacks “a defining national ideology” (252), due to which “the nation has not found its democratic voice” (118). In this sense, the questions of who is a member of the “nation,” and how relations of inclusion and exclusion function in the Russian context seem to be crucial (111).

Some of the author's statements seem to require a post-structuralist approach to identity. Thus, he states there exists “the lack of a unifying ‘Russian’ vision for Russia's future” (260). Then he describes domestic structures of power as “federal colonialism” (111), an apparent oxymoron that needs to be read not simply as a metaphor of political hybridity, but in a deeper sense: as an indication of the inherent inclination of the Russian state to invert western democratic concepts into their opposites, and adapt a seemingly federal framework of center-periphery relations to the interests of central authorities, apparently at the expense of the subnational units. It is through this lens that one should read the thesis with which I could not agree more: “Russia has the unique attribute of having been both a colony and colonizer” (50), which leads to the interpretation of the post-Soviet condition as a post-colonial type of transformation.

Yet at a certain point it appears that David Foley is essentializing Russia's specificity by claiming, for example, that “Russians might be averse to adopting a form of governance that was born in the West” (48). To that one may add that “the people of the Soviet Russia, prior to the coup of 1991, never flooded into the streets…as a mass public to demand regime change” (38), which implies that all meaningful changes were results of intra-elite dynamics, and there is little evidence that this state of affairs might change in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, naming Russia a non-democracy does not look sufficient to the author, and he looks for other characterizations, such as “pseudo-empire” (111), or an “empire-like regime” (208). In this regard, one should take seriously the author's claim that “many of the objective conditions said to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union are evident in Russia today” (105).

The book represents a typical western gaze on Russia. This is evident from a glaring absence of Russian sources or even literatures—the author is fully dependent in his knowledge about Russia on English-language texts that he cites so often that some parts of the book resemble a lengthy literature review. From the very first page, Foley commences his discussion with references to several western scholars, which implies that Russian political debates are either non-existent, or the author is not interested in covering them. Relying on his predecessors in Russian studies, he borrows excessively rigid categorizations from them, often divided into a limited number of bullet points. Thus, he simplistically claims that “the Russian transition was limited to five options” (19), that Russian federalism has “five characteristics” (43), followed by the “four stages of democratization” (53), “three levels of elite” (54), “six objective characteristics” of modernization (111), and so on.

Yet the western-centric gaze is risky. The author falsely speaks about “citizenship” in republics within the Russian Federation, for example, and then uses interchangeably categories of citizens and residents in the krais. Multiple references to agreements between the federal center and regions are misspelt in transcription. Reference to a “Russian Republic” (33) also looks misleading—there is simply no such object. Some of the arguments are unclear—for example, why do “oblasts have no relevance as a unit type in the free-market federal democracy” (22)? Some other claims are over-generalized: “the Russian people identify with and support the office and the powers of the federation president as a national leader…but have little or no loyalty to, or identification with, the regional subject regime” (24). Foley confounds domestic federalism with what he enigmatically dubs “Slavic-Russian expansion” (26) to the neighboring countries. His claim that “Soviet institutions of governance were never deeply institutionalized” (40) is highly contestable. Some of the statements are wishful projections of western visions of Russia: “Democratization is the preferred and ultimate outcome for the Russian people” (53), followed by such self-evident statements as “a market economy cannot be built without a free-market infrastructure” (17). Lack of contextualization lead Foley to strident conclusions, such as “Moscow is the cultural center of the nation” (54)—a statement that many in St. Petersburg would question.

Another huge omission of the book is the way the author uses concepts—the building blocs of any scholarship. In the introduction, he emphasizes his interest in studying the regional dimension of Russian domestic politics, which is, by the way, not clear from the book title. What is more, the author avoids giving a definition of regionalism and fails to explain its distinction from federalism. Again, the addition to the analysis of multiple Russian debates, particularly vibrant in the 1990s, would certainly upgrade the value of the book.