In this empirically rich and analytically rigorous book, Avierzer Tucker brings together insights from political philosophy and findings from social science studies in order to evaluate the impact of the communist past on post-communist transitions in Central and East Europe (and, to a lesser extent, Russia). The overarching argument is that totalitarianism cast a very long shadow, whether we analyze the development after 1989 of public institutions, such as the educational system; issues that capture the core differences between state socialism and capitalist liberal democracy, such as rule of law and property rights; or questions of justice, such as policies associated with rectification and retribution.

The book makes a number of compelling arguments. I highlight three in particular. First, unlike many analysts, Tucker dates the beginning of the transition not in 1989–1990 but, rather, in the last years of communism (which he terms late totalitarianism) when, to borrow from Jacek Tarkowski, apparatchiks began to transform themselves into “entrepreneurchiks.” As Tucker summarizes this dynamic, leaving communism provided the communist elite with a welcome opportunity to solidify their interests by adding rights to the equation. As a result, they were able to dispense with both hierarchy and envy—the primary impediments to their accumulation of property during the last years of state socialism.

Second, much of his analysis rests on the argument that the transition to democracy and especially capitalism required resources that had been seriously depleted because of the totalitarian experience. These deficits were a key problem, for example, in the attempts across the region to address questions of justice, thereby affecting the depth, scope, and roughness of justice. However, the lack of resources was also a problem for staffing political, economic, and public institutions. Personnel appropriate for a liberal order “do not grow on trees” (p. 182).

Finally, Tucker draws insightful philosophical distinctions between liberals and republicans and, in the case of property rights in particular, between radical and conservative, historical, and consequentialist positions (see, especially, the chart on p. 158). These distinctions anchor competing approaches to transformation, and they alert us to the complex choices and their trade-offs when the issue at hand involves dealing with the past and moving from one political-economic regime to another. Chapters 2–5, which feature the strongest arguments and the richest array of evidence in the book, build on such distinctions and, in the process, remind us of how much we can benefit from combining political theory with empirical evidence.

There are three aspects of this study, however, that I find less compelling. One is the costs associated with the author’s decision at the outset to concentrate on commonalities rather than differences among these regimes, especially during the totalitarian phase. For those of us who worked on state socialism, the differences among these regimes—for example, in the size, cohesion, strategies, successes, and failures of dissident communities; in the extent, form, and targets of repression; in cultural diversity; and in how regimes addressed the region-wide problem of the economic slowdown—were important in and of themselves and, later, gave us the tools we needed to analyze variation in post-communist pathways. Put simply, once regime transition began, we were in a strong position to use these indicators of variation as independent rather than dependent variables.

Second, I am uncomfortable with Tucker’s use of the term late totalitarianism to describe the last decades of state socialism. Most of us who worked on these regimes during the communist period did not use the term totalitarianism because it was an ideal type. Moreover, it failed more and more as these systems evolved to capture their essential political and economic characteristics—for example, the opening up of many of these economies to the global economy and the declining role of both terror and ideology.

Finally, Tucker’s treatment of the transition is asymmetric. Politics, including such issues as political parties, public opinion, and legislatures, receives scant attention. Every analyst is entitled, of course, to pick and choose his or her issues of interest. That recognized, however, can we understand the issues of central importance to an analyst, such as law and the transition to a market economy, without recognizing the importance of politics? Indeed, I would take this argument one step further. Like the communist experiment, so the liberal experiment was founded on four premises: Resources were scarce, the past was unjust, political and economic change went hand in hand, and, finally, time was of the essence. Politics, in short, was in command.