The postcommunist experience has once again brought the study of the state to the forefront of the discipline. Nearly 20 years ago, the changes under way in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were seen as a largely unprecedented “dual transition” that involved both the shift from a planned to a market economy and the replacement of authoritarian with democratic institutions. Over roughly the past decade, many scholars of the region have determined that this earlier characterization was too optimistic. The struggle to raise revenue, a failure to provide basic public goods, and the rise of organized crime have all pointed to a third transition under way: the transformation of the state itself.

Notwithstanding widespread agreement that we should be paying closer attention to the state, we are only beginning to understand the nature of state breakdown and subsequent restructuring in postcommunist countries. Venelin Ganev's Preying on the State is an important and timely contribution to this ongoing investigation. Arguing that the current state of knowledge prioritizes the generation of hypotheses over other forms of inquiry, Ganev uses the early history of postcommunist Bulgaria to “offer generalizations that might be further refined through testing” (p. 25). Judged by this standard—whether it provokes new thinking about an important topic—the book is an unquestioned success.

Ganev's particular contribution is to recast old debates in new terms, showing how theoretical approaches used elsewhere can shed new light on the state. This “recalibration of existing research agendas” (p. 9) will seem especially natural to those who have followed the literature on the postcommunist transition. For others, some of the arguments may seem novel or esoteric, though the author does a nice job of placing them into context. This tension between speaking to scholars of the region and to the broader discipline is a leitmotif of the book, one that for my taste is sometimes resolved too readily in favor of the former.

Following initial reflections, the book proceeds in approximate chronological fashion, beginning with the chaotic period that followed the deposition of longtime Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov. In contrast to many of its neighbors, Bulgaria returned a largely unreconstructed socialist party to power in the first free elections following the collapse of communism. Other authors have stressed the importance of these founding elections for former communist parties and the political elite; Ganev emphasizes instead the effect on the state. (Similar ground is covered in two other recently published books, Conor O'Dwyer's [2006] Runaway State-Building and Anna Grzymala-Busse's [2007] Rebuilding Leviathan.) Blessed with the opportunity to withdraw from the state at its leisure, the Bulgarian Socialist Party took along much of the administrative machinery as it left, appropriating information and other assets necessary for effective state intervention in the economy. Throughout this period, ex-Communists converted their political influence into economic power, a phenomenon documented in nearly every country in the region. Shifting attention from where resources went to whence they were withdrawn, Ganev focuses on the consequences of these conversions for the state, cataloging the various types of capital (reputational as well as physical) that were lost as a result.

In principle, the collapse of the state might have stopped with this initial withdrawal. In Bulgaria, it did not, as early winners moved to lock in their gains and amass greater riches. Staffed by numerous ex-cadres, the conglomerate Multigroup (an unexplored question of transition is why so many powerful firms had names straight out of a bad screenplay) fended off various attempts to curtail its rent-seeking activities. The exercise of its “veto power” further enfeebled the state, as when Multigroup used its connections to Russia's Gazprom to saddle Bulgaria with unfavorable long-term contracts for the supply of natural gas. At the same time, there were attempts to import new institutions from the West. Ganev traces the divergent fortunes of the Bulgarian National Bank and the Constitutional Court in part to the fact that there was more money to be made in crippling the former than the latter.

The portrayal of the state as a piñata filled with goodies for those who would destroy it comes together for an impressive concluding chapter. Drawing on the work of Charles Tilly, Ganev suggests that the evolution of state structures in postcommunist Europe is driven by an elite project to extract resources. Unlike the West European case that is Tilly's focus, however, the resources to be extracted in Eastern Europe were already in the hands of the state. Elites therefore set about destroying institutions rather than building them. This “reversed Tillyan perspective” suggests a general framework for thinking about the evolution of the postcommunist state that goes beyond the particular arguments presented in the book.

The strengths of Preying on the State are related to one of its few weaknesses: a tendency to wear its self-consciousness on its sleeve. There is a great deal of meta-analysis to wade through on the way to the argument, as when Ganev argues with respect to work on the conversion of political into economic power that “the unquestioned acceptance of the analytical assumptions underpinning such projects has had a somewhat constraining effect” (p. 67). One has the sense of joining the author for the intellectual journey, rather than simply reading the book after he is home.

Still, it is a fascinating journey, and not just because Bulgaria is such an interesting case. In essence, Ganev tells us that we do not have to reinvent the wheel to study the third element of the “triple transition”; we just need to train existing concepts on a new subject. This book should be read by anyone with an interest in one of the great historical episodes of state transformation.