Taxation in postcommunist states is at least doubly peculiar: States must learn to tax wealth in private hands that barely existed previously, and societies must learn to relate to tax institutions that barely existed previously. Gerald Easter has provided a comprehensively researched and grippingly written account of how these twin tests were met in Poland and Russia. To summarize the argument of this book, Polish state actors encountered a private sector of petty capitalists and workers, and their interaction struck a consensual bargain over tax powers, citizen obligations, and the nature of public benefits in a “contractual state.” By contrast, the Russian economy was dominated by large-scale extractive industries available only through elite bargains imposed with coercive authority in a “predatory state.” The contrast serves to demonstrate the gradual accretion of political struggles and institutional forms, diverse varieties of tax regimes, and the contribution to our understanding of state—society relations made by the postcommunist experience, where “the flow of power ran from state to society, rather than in the opposite direction” (p. 187).

Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States navigates these insights by tracing a path that is at once both temporal and conceptual. Easter addresses four carefully conceptualized categories in which Poland and Russia stand in clearest contrast: initial conditions, politics of revenue bargains, transitional tax regimes, and institutional outcomes. Initial conditions include the crisis of old-regime finances, structure of capital, and disposition of coercion. The politics of revenue bargains describes the back-and-forth between state actors seeking revenues and societal holders of wealth, in which political processes consolidate more or less consensual or conflictive patterns. Transitional tax regimes are either consent based or coercion based, depending on the combination of tax policy, the means of extraction, and patterns of compliance. Finally, institutional outcomes vary in performance and in the new boundaries between state and society.

In Poland, the crumbling of the old regime and the politics of competing posttransition actors redistributed power resources such that the coercive authority of the state was constrained, subordinated to horizontal institutions of control and vertical mechanisms of societal accountability. Economic opportunity opened for widely dispersed entrepreneurial actors, with whom the state slowly negotiated the terms of “social market capitalism” (pp. 166–68). Under this arrangement, the state respected private property rights in exchange for tax contributions toward a welfare-state regime of social protections for a labor movement inherited from the regime transition. While tax avoidance occurred, evasion was not widespread, and elite-level consensus and a growing civil society overcame occasional disputes to negotiate a contractual relationship with tax administrators. As a result, the state secured revenues from newly emerging small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs who accepted state authority and the state-corporate-labor bargain as legitimate.

In Russia, the collapse of the old regime left coercive authority intact, available for state actors to deploy against regional elites within the state and social actors outside it. The state ceded its most lucrative assets in extractive industries in a pattern of “concessions capitalism,” in which the state cultivated elite factions but never fully relinquished claims to their wealth (pp. 168–72). This deprived society of autonomous political and economic resources, and elite divisions left few institutional or societal checks on state coercion. At first, this created a poorly performing tax regime in which widespread evasion undercut fiscal resources and the state lacked the resources to respond to both domestic and international difficulties. The coercive arm of the state learned from the fragmented weakness of the 1990s, and took advantage of the commodity resource boom and limited constraints on their coercive authority to reconstitute the fiscal regime. During the 2000s, they were able to marshal resources in predatory fashion from capital concentrated in the hands of social actors dependent on the state for their wealth.

Among the book's most intriguing contributions is its attention to the culture of tax administration. The field of political science has lost some of its capacity to characterize the rich variety of institutional practice, perhaps because of contemporary disciplinary and methodological rigidities. Easter offers the nuanced description that can only come from deep understanding, and he demonstrates his argument with a combination of research methods, including case description of particularly illuminating confrontations between tax authorities and capital, qualitative interview records with tax officials and business elites, and quantitative public-opinion data on perceptions of authority, obligation, and state–society interaction on taxation. The use of provocative conceptual labels and firsthand reports paints a compelling picture of quasi-authoritarian intimidation in Russia and limited quasi-voluntary compliance in Poland. Russian tax authority rested on “bureaucratic coercion” in which authorities declared that “people must learn to be afraid of us” (p. 193). Polish tax authority rested on “legalistic consent” described according to the calculation that “if you take only 20–30 percent from the treasury, then you are still a decent taxpayer and inspectors have not time or energy to bother with you” (p. 119). Such fertile images capture the detail of transitional tax regimes and contribute to an understanding of the way in which administrative institutions contribute to the fiscal process of state capacity building and the reconfiguring of state–society relations.

The exploration of the many puzzles within postcommunism brings wholly new insights to the field of fiscal sociology. This growing area of research addresses the character of revenue bargains struck by state and society, in which one major focus of research is the way state fiscal policy shapes society. By establishing tax regimes and the means to enforce them, state actors shape the kind of economic activity that will occur—such as the exploitation of natural resources by concentrated corporations ceded from the state, as in Russia, or dispersed, smaller-scale entrepreneurship, as in Poland. Further, state fiscal policy influences the nature of social organization and autonomy. Russian taxation maintained elite dependence, weak civil-society organizations, and an absence of alternative claims of moral authority in a “dependent society.” By contrast, Polish tax policy acknowledged elite wealth and status, encouraged the cultivation of autonomous social organization, and reinforced the alternative moral authority of the Catholic Church in a “civil society.” Fiscal sociology is an emerging field, and the uniqueness of postcommunist experience makes possible a number of theoretical and conceptual contributions.

In fact, postcommunist cases contradict some of the core assumptions of traditional narratives about the complementary relationship between capitalist development and state modernization: an emerging bourgeoisie negotiates tax contributions and state capacity building with power holders who cede democratic mechanisms of oversight and space for private accumulation. Yet the postcommunist countries do not fit this narrative, as regime collapse bequeathed highly capable states built in the absence of capitalism, and transition required somehow transferring some of that capacity to society. What Easter does masterfully is describe the way political and economic resources are redistributed through contingent and uncertain political processes in which outcomes are never preordained. In Russia, elite bargains among regional actors eager to develop lucrative economic opportunities while constraining the central government might have appeared a more propitious environment for a “contractual state.” Instead, it was the case of Poland where solidly ensconced public-sector workers defending state ownership and public benefits prevented the emergence of a “predatory state.” Prevailing comparative politics theories of democracy and development suggest just the opposite outcomes of elite bargains and ensconced public-sector workers, highlighting the utility of examining the postcommunist context.

While the uniqueness of these cases prompts revisions to a number of intellectual traditions, a few elements remain in the background and indicate that it may be time to bring the postcommunist context into broader comparison. Comparison among postcommunist regimes addresses patterns of international insertion only in passing. International factors appear largely in terms of their impact on the structure of capital—concentrated or dispersed—and the occasional pressure of international markets—financial crises and the requirements of accession to international treaties. Such factors are important elements of the relationship between the state and capitalists and the ability of the state to perform in the face of challenges. Patterns of international insertion might gain greater purchase by bringing less developed countries into the comparison. In such countries, international forces clearly influence domestic actors, just as in Russia and Poland. Yet small and poor countries, perhaps because they are so vulnerable, also expose quite clearly the efforts of political and economic elites to act strategically within the constraints of the international system. Such considerations would probably not lessen the contrast or alter the narrative that describes outcomes in Poland and Russia, but attention to the strategic action of domestic actors in and on their international environment would certainly add a dimension to the analysis that currently appears only in its domestic reflection.

While broadening the comparison to less developed countries might foreground the dimension of international insertion, broadening the comparison to more developed countries might provoke questions about accepted models of fiscal sociology. Lurking behind much fiscal sociology is a liberal ideal to which the Russian predatory state compares poorly, with the Polish contractual state ranking higher and the liberal, capitalist, democratic states of the United States and Western Europe occupying the apex. With Easter's focus on contingency and process, he is careful to avoid the teleological presumption that states necessarily evolve in one direction on this continuum. Still, the fickle record of the United States on taxation, the difficulties of European liberal democracies after the 2008 crisis, and the variations in the nature of taxation across developed states suggest that the ideal-typical liberal state is neither ideal nor typical.

It is certainly too much to ask any one book to make comparisons across countries at all levels of development, and the current project does an admirable job of conveying the range of variation across postcommunist countries. The Russian and Polish experiences generate concepts, causal processes, and theoretical arguments that will encourage ongoing debate about the nature of postcommunism, the trials of state building and capitalist development, and the sociology of public finance. Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States is accessible enough for the advanced undergraduate, is sophisticated enough for graduate students and scholars, and includes enough policy and political detail to be of interest to the policymaker or businessperson interested in improving fiscal regimes and democratic process.