The book takes an ethnographic approach to the study of postcommunist society. The fieldwork was conducted in the cities of Syktyvkar (the capital of the Komi Republic) and Kirov (formerly Vyatka) between October 1993 and August 1994. The material is marginally updated as a result of a further research trip to Syktyvkar in summer 1997, but the work stands or falls on the material gathered during the earlier research to these two provincial towns nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Moscow. The general argument, rehearsed repeatedly though the book, is that traditional and predominantly quantitative methods fail to grasp the complexity of political culture. Alexander insists that only ethnographic methods, above all, open-ended face-to-face interviews, can provide the nuance that is forgone by closed-question surveys.

The two towns selected as case studies are illustrative of two federal categories: Syktyvkar is the capital of a republic and thus enjoys enhanced federal privileges and greater independence from the central authorities. Kirov, on the other hand, is just one of Russia's 50-odd ordinary oblasts (regions). A further difference between the two is that Kirov is an industrial town tied to the fortunes of the military industrial complex, whereas Syktyvkar is a relatively small administrative center in a republic that has great natural resources that were once exploited by prisoners in the many labor camps that formed part of the gulag archipelago. The differences between the two towns allowed conclusions to be drawn from the differential impact of economic reform on public attitudes, assessed on the basis of some 30 interviews with representative individuals in each place. The author insists that it is misleading to suggest that there is a homogeneous national political culture and, instead, argues that each community will have contours of its own. To a degree this is proven, but largely in matters of detail: there appears to be a remarkable underlying similarity between the two areas in broader cultural responses to the breakdown of the old order and the troubled birth of the new.

The analysis is structured in terms of a tension between two types of political culture, “democratic” and “authoritarian,” although Alexander allows some subtle blending of the two. He adds another variable, the notion of “formlessness,” to suggest the flux undergone by political culture in a period of accelerated change. The basic conclusion is that Russian political culture still bears the imprint of Soviet authoritarianism, yet was “primed” (p. 3) for liberal democracy as it exited communism. The work explores the tension between continuity and change, examining the dynamics of both and the often contradictory political culture that emerges as a result. Crude versions of the “continuity” thesis—of an unbroken and implicitly unchangeable Russian tradition of authoritarianism—are rejected. Alexander nevertheless insists that the dominant trend in Russian political culture is support for the symbols and values of what we may call “Russian traditionalism.” Although Alexander does not say so, his findings appear to be confirmed by the rise of Vladimir Putin's distinctive blend of a liberal modernizing agenda cast in a traditionalist form. The book suggests that a political system out of kilter with the political culture (pace Eckstein's notion of congruence) will be unstable and that the optimal outcome is a “resting place” (pp. 40–1) in which the two reinforce each other. It remains to be seen whether Putin's system is that stable “resting place” for Russia.

The work is thus an unusual combination of “thick explanation” (not description; p. 67) and a methodological critique of the traditional survey approach to the study of political culture. The author insists that the latter cannot begin to identify and quantify the nuances of popular understandings, beliefs, and preferences, arguing that words and concepts take on different meanings as they travel between cultures. This point is perhaps rather labored, since the better studies of political culture have always been aware of the need for historical contextualisation, but appears to be part of the author's own liberation (suggested in his comments about his two years spent in the Peace Corps in Ecuador in the mid-1980s) from the tyranny of quantitative methodologies. Similarly, the concept of “formlessness” is not adequately theorized: One wonders whether there would be substantively greater “form” in Western popular perceptions of terms such as “democracy” and “freedom.” The precise relationship between formlessness and the broader problem of regime change and societal transition is not adequately spelled out; that is, to what degree is the so-called formlessness a structural characteristic of a society that has responded in traumatic ways to the challenges of modernity for well over a century? Or is it a local phenomenon confined to the postcommunist transition? The associated issue of the direction of causality is not adequately addressed: The relationship between institutional development and societal characteristics—the eternal tension in transition studies between state-centered and societally oriented approaches—is left hanging in the air.

The key test of any work studying political culture is the durability of the evidence and results. The bulk of Alexander's research was conducted in the early 1990s, at a particularly traumatic time of institutional change, culminating in the violent confrontation between the presidency and the parliament in Moscow in October 1993. To what degree can his findings help us understand long-term patterns of development? The blend of political science and anthropological methods (although I doubt whether professional anthropologists would recognize his approach as in any way anthropological) does in fact produce results that transcend the narrow limitations of the time and place in which they were conducted. Although some of the claims for methodological originality are rather exaggerated, the study does help establish the contours of the formlessness (a contradiction that is recognized in the work itself), insisting that the experiences of democratization and marketization themselves contribute to shaping political responses; and thus primordialist approaches to the study of political culture are rejected. The enduring value of this work, however, perhaps lies not in the detailed analysis of the formlessness of the transition, but in the establishment of a framework in which we can begin to understand the process of “recreation” of a stable political order. This book takes us some way along this path but is constrained by its limited time horizon and its engagement in other debates. However, any attempt to understand the way in which tradition and innovation are being recombined in contemporary Russia will be the poorer without drawing on Alexander's theoretically sophisticated, methodologically robust and empirically rich work.