Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine put the spotlight on the impetus for the Kremlin’s undertaking of a blunder of historic proportions. Besides the damage inflicted on Ukraine, the invasion has arguably set back Russian development by decades, forcing thousands of highly educated professionals into exile and cutting Russia off from lucrative export markets and international supply chains. It has ironically undermined President Putin’s long-stated ambition to catch up to the West technologically and firmly establish the country as a great power.

Vladimir Gel’man did not predict the invasion (nor did other country specialists) but his trenchant analysis of the pathologies of governance in Russia goes a long way toward making sense of this senseless war. Unlike accounts that focus on the nature of Russia’s regime or the strength of its state, Gel’man focuses on the quality of its governance, which he labels—eschewing both jargon and ambivalence—“bad.” His analysis implicates a combination of informal networks and practices as the root of Russia’s problems, and individual agents as the prime movers. In governing badly, political elites deliberately ensure that the state is operated informally and arbitrarily in order to extract rents. They prioritize private gains over public goods and politics over policy. They resist efforts to strengthen the rule of law and constantly work to fend off competition over rents from other insiders. Gel’man distinguishes his agency-centered approach—“purposeful actions of political and economic actors who aimed to maximize benefits for themselves” (p. 31)—from accounts that privilege institutions or historical legacies as explanations for Russia’s maladies.

This optic allows Gel’man to examine failed reforms of institutions such as Russian Railways, university examinations, the state administration, the social benefits system, and the police, in each instance highlighting problems of top-down supervision and inter-agency rivalries within the notionally rule-based “power vertical.” These case studies reveal how, time and again, nominally public-oriented initiatives are thwarted by self-interested bureaucratic insiders, demonstrating two classic Olsonian logics: concentrated interests winning out over the public good, and “roving bandits” seeking a quick ruble. Repeatedly, leaders realize that following through on difficult changes may reduce their power or prestige, leading them to back down and accept the (profitable) status quo.

On this basis, in Chapter 3, Gel’man dismantles the myth of “authoritarian modernization” that the government has used to legitimize its curtailing of political freedoms. While there have been sporadic successes within pockets of efficiency, they are few and far between amid a heap of failed projects. As Chapter 4 details, the only successful transformations have enjoyed an unusual coincidence of top-level prioritization, concentration of reforms in a single agency, and a short time frame. Thus, the tax code was changed early in Putin’s first term, but more complex reform initiatives have failed. Even the Soviet space program, a paragon of technocratic management, was eventually consumed by bureaucratic self-interest after its initial successes.

The Politics of Bad Governance is an important contribution to Russian politics and policy, and authoritarian and comparative politics more generally. The book pairs a parsimonious and somewhat provocative thesis with case studies shedding light on governance in Russia. In probing deeply into policy development and implementation, Gel’man flaunts his vast knowledge of the inner workings of the Russian state—also evident in his prolific publication record going back decades—rather than the flashier but well-trodden ground of Russia’s foreign policy (mis)adventures or Putin’s consolidation of autocracy. While the book is probably the best overview of thirty years of intermittent and failed modernization in Russia, it can also come off as overly wonkish at times for non-specialists.

Gel’man’s emphasis on agency over structures raises interesting questions. Agency figures in two ways: in the creation of the system in the 1990s and in the stifling of attempts to change it over time. Yet once the system has been molded, it is questionable whether Gel’man’s case studies actually demonstrate the primacy of agency as an explanatory factor. The agents impeding reform—local officials, school directors, and various middle managers—work within the system they inherited, which constrains both their freedom of action and those of reformers. In this way, earlier agency has created structures that in turn impede later agents. The result is an account in which an understanding of how the system operates, and perpetuates itself, is critical. Although Gel’man seeks to distinguish his argument from previous accounts implying that the system is sticky and plausibly unchangeable, Bad Governance covers much the same ground as Alena Ledeneva’s (2013) “sistema” and Henry Hale’s (2014) “patronal politics.”

How exceptional is Russia? Gel’man positions it as a “deviant” case (p. 6) in light of its high standard of living and human capital. Yet the maladies that Gel’man cites afflicting Russia—overregulation, bureaucratic sluggishness, turf battles, short-termism, institutional inertia, patronage politics, rent-seeking, and the prioritization of politics above policy—have long been the global norm rather than the exception, and are present to some degree even in well-governed countries. In light of recent challenges to democracy across the world, Russia may be seen as a precocious case of middle- and upper-income countries whose leaders deliberately manipulate the system for their own benefit, a club joined more recently by Turkey, Hungary and Trump’s United States (p. 139). Russia may therefore not be so deviant after all.

As to whether there is any way out, Gel’man’s prognosis is appropriately pessimistic. International leverage worked with willing Eastern European elites intent on joining the EU, but not on ensconsed Russian functionaries. Pockets of efficiency are small-scale and doomed due to eventual neglect or politics. Digitization has been introduced with much fanfare in many nondemocratic states, yet policy makers protective of their prerogatives will not allow any innovation to usurp their power.

Perhaps Gel’man’s most disconcerting yet unsurprising conclusion is that free and fair elections are unlikely to make a dent, at least in the near term. While democracy may be a necessary step toward more accountability and better governmental performance, precedents show that it is not a sufficient condition to break free from old patterns. Instead, the most likely outcome is a broadening of the scope for new entrants to compete over the spoils of corruption.

This book was published before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of that invasion, as of spring 2023, vividly demonstrate bad governance in action. Not only did most Western analysts and intelligence agencies overlook the dysfunction in Russia’s military and ministry of defense, the Kremlin was also deceived into believing it was deploying an efficient war machine rather than the ramshackle, bloated, and decaying clunker it turned out to be. The supremacy of politics over competence was visible in the runup to the invasion, when spies told their superiors what they wanted to hear about whether Ukrainians would fight back, and ground troops were misled about whether they were going to war. Putin’s naïve faith in the system he created both enabled the decision to invade and explain how Ukraine’s significantly outmatched army has managed to fight Russia’s to a standstill. Yet, faced with the most comprehensive sanctions in history, Russia also managed to stabilize its currency, reroute its supply chain, and stave off a collapse in GDP, pointing to both the skill of technocrats (e.g., in the Central Bank) and the adaptability of a system built on informality. Gel’man expects countries governed badly to muddle through and avoid catastrophes, but perhaps the best to be hoped for from the war is that bad governance, taken to its extremes, ends up destroying its own foundations. Unfortunately, before this can happen, things are likely to get much worse.