The need to understand Russian politics is arguably greater today than at any time since the Soviet Union’s collapse. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea set off alarm bells among policymakers and scholars, who worried that the development could dramatically alter existing norms of national sovereignty. In Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, Vladimir Gel’man, Otar Marganiya and Dmitry Travin explore the origins of Russia’s present regime by seeking to explain changes in Russia’s reform process, from the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev through that of Boris Yeltsin. Although the work focuses explicitly on Russia, the approach is novel and could be adapted to other contexts. Specifically, the authors aim to bring ideology back into the scholarly discussion of Russian development by arguing that reform changes between 1985 and 2000 reflected the power struggles between two generations of the ruling elite—labeled the “sixtiers” and “seventiers”—with fairly distinct worldviews.

Sixtiers launched their careers between the 20th Party Congress in 1956 and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. During this post-Stalin thaw, the sixtiers developed ideas of how best to advance socialist society. However, due to Brezhnev-era stagnation, the sixtiers converted their ideas into action only after the ascension of Gorbachev. The result, according to the authors, was an outdated reform agenda. Most sixtiers not only knew little about experiments with socialism elsewhere in Eastern Europe but also had little to offer in terms of practical policy recommendations. As a result, Gel’man and his colleagues depict the perestroika-era slogan “more democracy, more socialism” as an apt description of the generation’s goals, with a return to more Leninist intraparty discussion underpinning political reform and the idea of workers’ self-administration prevailing on the economic front (pp. 11–13).

In contrast to perestroika-era reforms, the reforms in the 1990s reflected the reigning ideology of a younger generation. Seventiers began their careers between the 1968 Prague Spring and the start of perestroika. The ideas of this generation were formed under conditions of economic and political decay, and reflected corresponding levels of cynicism. As a result, the authors argue, since pragmatism and a desire for material wealth characterized the seventiers, their ideas for reform centered on ways to address the failings of the Soviet economy, with little understanding of, and possibly little interest in, democracy (p. 16). These intergenerational differences matter because the simultaneity of Russia’s political and economic transitions meant that the country’s leadership had to make tough decisions about which reforms to prioritize, and representatives from different generations pursued different priorities. Their interaction helped determined the country’s trajectory.

With their generation-based generalizations in hand, the authors reanalyze Russia’s reform trajectories. Many of the actors, events, and policies discussed will be familiar to scholars of Russian politics; the discussion also will serve as an accessible yet insightful introduction to other readers. The authors’ contribution, then, is the analytical lens employed to make sense of the ebbs and flows of reform, offering an explanation that strikes a useful balance between structure and agency. Their understanding of Russia’s reform policies as products of elite conflict where different generations represent different ideological camps includes a recognition of the ways in which systemic constraints and opportunities influence policymaking decisions while also permitting room for outcomes to reflect the relative power of rival camps. The work rightly reminds readers that the occupant of the Kremlin is not the sole determinant of Russia’s past, present, and future and that too heavy of a reliance on structural explanations cannot account for sudden changes in the direction of reform.

One might suppose that categorizing politicians of the same generation as sharing similar reform objectives risks painting history with too broad a brush. In practice, however, the authors are careful to treat sixtiers and seventiers as ideal types. They acknowledge exceptions, highlight intragenerational divisions over specific policies, and use interviews and personal accounts from the politicians to substantiate assertions about corresponding worldviews. In other words, they do not assert that exceptions and policy disagreements were absent. Rather, the point is that existing conditions (see pp. 59–64) limited the range of options under consideration in Russia, in general, while the likelihood of Russia’s leadership prioritizing democratic or economic reforms depended on the ability of a team from one generation to triumph over a team from the other. From this perspective, power maximization, which Gel’man and his colleagues describe as an undeniable political motive (p. 4), buttresses the analysis.

Although the work represents an important addition to our understanding of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation, its appeal to a cross section of scholars will require some extrapolation from Russia to new contexts. As it stands, the breakpoints between generations, the origins of the ideologies governing the generations’ reform agendas, and the explanations for why some individuals defy expectations are case specific. In the absence of some general rules of thumb about the kinds of events that can spawn new ways of thinking or about the personal experiences that might lead members of one generation to develop worldviews that differ from the rest of their generation (e.g., Alexander Yakovlev, p. 45) or to hold on longer than their cohort to a worldview from an older generation (e.g., Anatoly Chubais, p. 70), a broader impact may not materialize.

While Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia emphasizes the effect of ideology on Russia’s transition from Soviet rule, Authoritarian Russia by Vladimir Gel’man downgrades the explanatory power of ideology. In this work, power maximization takes center stage as Gel’man argues that Russia’s politicians created biased institutions and resorted to fear and lies to stay in office. Importantly, he asserts that Russian politicians are no worse on this front than other politicians around the globe (p. 9). The difference is that Russian politicians have simply faced fewer constraints. That is, unlike democratic success stories, Russia has lacked conditions that could impede the accumulation of too much political power into too few hands. Specifically, he identifies four factors capable of preventing authoritarian drift: 1) mass participation in politics, 2) the presence of domestic elite conflict that cannot be, or has not been, resolved in a zero-sum fashion, 3) international influence that effectively incentivizes democratic practices, and 4) an ideology that might lead authoritarian rulers to make poorly informed decisions that, in turn, could breed unintended consequences capable of weakening their positions (pp. 33–36). According to Gel’man, since these conditions are largely absent in post-Soviet Russia, political agency has been able to overwhelm any structural advantages that would have favored Russia’s democratization.

Given the contribution of the 2014 volume, it is initially surprising that Gel’man describes ideology as “probably the least meaningful factor in Russian politics since the Soviet collapse” (p. 11). However, it seems that he uses ideology differently in Authoritarian Russia. In Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, ideology is defined as a shared mental model that helps actors prioritize and make decisions based on available information (p. 5). The definition is broad enough to encompass the pragmatism and desire for material gain that characterizes the seventiers. Authoritarian Russia, in contrast, portrays short-term pragmatism more as a rejection of ideology (p. 36). Thus, if one were to apply the former definition of ideology to Authoritarian Russia, then ideology matters immensely, only not in a way that threatens the regime: It is the seventiers’ “ideology” of pragmatism and the conditions that facilitated it that explain why Russia’s post-Soviet rulers behave like power maximizers. On the other hand, if one rejects pragmatism as an ideology, then any zigzags in reform under Gorbachev and Yeltsin must be reconceptualized as a battle between insistent followers of the ancien régime’s ideology and the ascension to power of politicians with no ideological allegiances. From this perspective, Russia’s reform trajectory has resulted less from a battle between rival ideologies than from ideological decline. Indeed, Gel’man’s assertion that politicians around the globe are, essentially, power maximizers might then be interpreted as a belief that the world has become a less ideological place.

The empirical analysis of Authoritarian Russia is a rich synthesis of Russia’s post-Soviet developments and recent theoretical advancements in the study of democratization and its authoritarian competitors. By necessity, the two works traverse common historical terrain, most evident in Chapter 5 (“The Roaring Nineties”) of Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms and Chapter 3 (“The Roaring 1990s”) of Authoritarian Russia. Still, these two accounts serve very different purposes. The first illustrates how seventiers prioritized economic reform over democracy, while the second demonstrates the virtual absence of compromise and prevalence of zero-sum politics. Equally important, Authoritarian Russia picks up where Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms leaves off, making the two a worthwhile pairing. For example, while the latter implies that authoritarianism in Russia partially emerged as a response to Russia’s status as a mediocre student in the school of market economics and democracy (pp. 114–15), Authoritarian Russia submits that Vladimir Putin’s skillful embrace of electoral authoritarianism could win him accolades as an A+ student in the “college for dictators” (p. 12).

How Russian authoritarianism has become a “success story” (p. 93) and how the dangers that Gel’man argues still linger behind Russia’s stable facade (Chapter 5) demand attention from comparative politics scholars. Still, it is Gel’man’s final chapter (Chapter 6)—which thoroughly interrogates alternative paths for Russia’s regime—that will likely capture most readers’ imagination and spur debate. In the scenarios discussed—from muddling through to the imposition of harsher authoritarian rule to creeping democratization—he uses the Russian case to tackle big questions while wisely arguing against attempts to provide definitive answers when so many potentially meaningful variables remain unknown.

In the end, both works conclude with “a bias of hope.” And, in both instances, the bias resides strongly on the prospects for generational change: a belief that some segments of Russian society will recognize “the dead end of the current regime and the need for new rules of the game” (Authoritarian Russia, p. 153). Regardless of what happens, these books will prove beneficial to anyone concerned with the outcome.