"Dermokratizatsiya " and "Prikhvatizatsiya":
The Russian Kleptocracy and Rise of
Organized Crime
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafia: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000; 296 pp.; ISBN 0-316-29474-8 (cloth);
$25.95.
Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of
Russia. New York: Harcourt, 2000; 400 pp.; ISBN 0-15-100621-0 (cloth);
$28.00.
James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring, Russian Mafia in America: Immigration, Culture, and Crime. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998; 320 pp.;
ISBN 1-55553-508-9 (paper); $18.95.
Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to
Capitalism. New York: Crown Publishers, 2000; 389 pp.; ISBN 0-8129-3215-3
(cloth); $27.50.
Jeffrey Robinson, The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized
Crime. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000; 383 pp.; ISBN 1-58567-030-8
(cloth); $27.95.
As then British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once sourly remarked,
"What we anticipate seldom occurs, and what we least expect generally happens." Russia watchers in the West expected the Russian economy to prosper, as
did the Chinese economy, once Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected Russian
president, cast off the communist mantle in 1991. Instead, he fostered the growth
of crony capitalism, deliberately enriching a handful of men in return for their
political support. Since Yeltsin's resignation in 1999, journalists and scholars have
begun to analyze his regime more frankly.
Although Gorbachev established in Russia the principies of free speech and
democratic accountability, Yeltsin failed to expand the aims of glasnost and per-
Johanna Granville is an assistant professor of political science at Clemson University.
449
450
DEM0KRATIZATSIYA
estroika. The "dernocrats," led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, freed prices
in 1992 and unleashed hyperinflation before they privatized Russia's assets. Most
Russian citizens lost their savings in only a few weeks. While the few billionaire
"oligarchs" liken themselves to the American "robber barons" of the nineteenth
century, no real comparison can be drawn. Those well-connected young men
made fortunes not by creating new enterprises that increased their country's
wealth, as did Carnegie (steel), Rockefeller (oil), Ford (automobiles), and Morgan (finance). Instead, they played the role of old state trading monopolies, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian cornmodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Instead of investing in the
Russian econorny, they stashed billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. Experts
estimate that as much as $15 billion leaves Russia each year as either "capital
flight" or laundered money from ¡Ilegal transactions.1
According to Swiss attorney general Carla del Ponte, by 1999 Russian organized
crime gangs had "infiltrated some 300 Swiss companies" and were "using Switzerland as a piggy bank"2 Failing to create a broad class of shareholders, Chubais'
voucher privatization in 1993-94 merely ceded Russia's industrial assets to corrupt
enterpri se managers or to the new Moscow banks. Chubais and his allies subsidized
the new banks by granting them Central Bank loans at negative real interest rates,
giving them the accounts of government institutions, and manipulating the government securities market in their favor. In the rigged loans-for-shares auctions of
1995-97, Chubais sold off the remaüning gems of Russian industry to a few insiders. By 1999 the Russian economy was half the size that it was a decade before;
the top 10 percent of the population owned half of the nation's wealth.3
Without much exaggeration, one may call the legacy of Boris Yeltsin one of
amost unmitigated failure-the biggest disaster (economically, socially, and
demographically) lince the Nazi invasion of 1941. For ordinary Russians, a
"democrat" is construed to be a crook, and "dernocracy" a curse word. On the
streets of Moscow they call the latter "shitocracy" (dermokratizatsiya) and privatization "grab-it-ization" (prikhvatizatsiya).'
The Russian state has metamorphosed into a full-fledged "kleptocracy"dedicated to enriching those in power and their associates, usually organized
criminal groups. As U.S. congressman Benjamin Gilman observed as early as
April 1996: "It is truly impossible, in many instantes to differentiate between
Russian organized crime and the Russian State"5 (The Russian Ministry of Internas Affairs calculated that at least '25 percent of Russia's gross national income
each year stems from organized criminal activities.e) However, a clear history of
criminal activity during the Yeltsin era is difficult to establish. Almost none of the
most famous murders (Kholodov, Listyev, and others) has been solved. Even past
convictions have been difficult to identify, since well-connected ex-convicts can
often remove their files, thus erasing any trace of past crimes.' Moreover, given
the corrupt system of law enforcement, when one is in debt, it is often cheaper to
pay a hit man to kill the creditor and bribe police officers to look the other way
than it is to pay off one's debts to the creditor.
Although organized crime prevailed in the communist nomenklatura when the
Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organized Crime 451
USSR still existed, U.S. authorities are focusing more heavily on it now, since
Russian white-collar crime has branched out all over the world. The scope of
power and control of organized criminals in Russia far exceeds the criminal control exercised by drug cartels in countries such as Colombia. Arms trafficking,
alien smuggling, money laundering, trafficking in vital materials such as oil and
timber, and (potentially) nuclear trafficking are among the Russian criminal enterprises on the international scene.
Those of us who lived for extended periods of time in Russia during the
Yeltsin era (1991-99) and remember the acute suffering of our Russian friends
will find recently published books about the Russian kleptocracy and organized
crime sad and shocking. Chrystia Freeland's Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild
Ridefrom Communism to Capitalism analyzes the economic breakdown and rise
of the "oligarchs" In Godfather of the Kremlin, Paul Klebnikov examines the
business and political career of arguably the most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Two other books discuss Russian organized crime as it has taken root
outside Russian borders: Red Mafia: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, by Robert I. Friedman, and Russian Mafia in America, by James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring. Finally, in The Merger, Jeffrey Robinson alerts us to
the limitless possibilities for international criminal syndicates in the global markets of transparent borders and urges greater cooperation among law enforcement agencies worldwide.
Freeland, Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, chronicles Russia's
roller-coaster ride from communism to crony capitalism. A protégé of Timothy
Colton at Harvard University's Russian Research Center, Rhodes scholar, and recipient of a Master's degree in Slavonic studies from Oxford, she writes poetically, with
creative metaphors, colorful word pictures, and a keen insight into Russian history.
The copious adverbs, adjectives, and details-sometimes superfluous-may, however, irritate those reading her book for the "bottom linea" The book also omits analysis of organized crime in general. On the other hand, a key strength of Sale of the
Century is Freeland's ability to bring to life the key players in Russian politics:
Yeltsin, Gaidar, Chubais, and the handful of wealthy oligarchs. As a journalist, she
was able to meet most of them often. The book enables the reader to develop a more
refined and differentiated understanding of the oligarchs. Among them are Mikhail
Friedman ("the outsider") who heads the Alfa Group, an oil, industrial, trading, and
financial conglomerate; Mikhail Khordokovsky ("the apparatchik") who leads
Menatep, the bank and financial-industrial conglomerate; Vladimir Potanin ("the
blueblood") who founded Oneximbank, which handles the ` juiciest" government
accounts, such as the State Customs Agency and the state arms-trading company
"Rosvooruzheniye"; Vladimir Gusinsky ("the impresario") who established inter
alia the consortium of banks known as the Most group, the newspaper Segodnya,
and the first independent television channel (NTV); and finally, Boris Berezovsky
("the nomad") who took over a number of enterprises and directly influenced the
presidential elections of 1996 and 2000.
In Klebnikov's Godfather of the Kremlin readers get extensive background on
Berezovsky, secret KGB plots, the nefarious "mob wars," and key events of the
452 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
1990s, such as the murders of journalísts Dmitri Kholodov (October 1994) and popular talk show host Vlad Listyev (1 March 1995), and acts of terrorism in Budyonnovsk (June 1995) and Moscow (September 1999). Like Freeland, Klebnikov has
an extensive background in Russian history. He eamed a Ph.D. in Russian history
from the London School of Economics before joining Forbes Magazine as senior
editor. Klebnikov's subtitle is perhaps more apt than Freeland's ("the looting of
Russia" as opposed to "the sale of the century"). On several occasions he interviewed Oleg Kalugin, head of the KGB's foreign counterintelligence division, who
revealed the KGB's double game in the landmark elections of 1990. We now know
that the KGB actually helped to create the first noncommunist party, promoting
ultranationalist groups such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party
and "Pamyat" (Memory). According to Klebnikov, the KGB in 1990 also created
a network of banks and trading companies both in Russia and overseas to collect
billions of dollars of government funds during the "period of emergency" and hold
them for the Communist nomenklatura as "a stable source of revenue, irrespective
of what may happen to the Party."8 Several days after the failed putsch in August
1991, Nikolai Kruchina, the man who controlled Communist Party funds and knew
the most about the secret capital flight, "jumped" out of his office window.9
Klebnikov portrays Berezovsky (dubbed the "apotheosis of sleaziness" by the
popular general Alexander Lebed) as a particularly ruthless and cunning tycoon
who perhaps profited more than anyone elle from Russia's slide into the abyss.
He stood closer than the other oligarchs to all three realms: crime, commerce, and
government. His success in both making money and claiming to be a valuable
statesman in the government's service was due in part to his relationships with
some of Russia's strongest gangsters, particularly the Chechen mafia. 10 In contrast to entrepreneurs such as Vladimir Gusinsky, Berezovsky did not enrich any
of the enterprises with which he became involved or took over (for example, the
car dealership Avtovaz, Sibneft, public television station ORT, Omsk Oil Refinery, National Sports Fund, and aluminum smelters Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, and
Novokuznetsk), but instead drained them of cash.
Klebnikov also provides insight into the cause of the first Russian war with
Chechnya (1994-96). Apart from Yeltsin's desire to appear strong for electoral
reasons, preserve the Russian Federation, divert attention from military scandals,
and maintain access to oil in the region, there is some reason to believe that Russian leaders wanted to punish Chechen mafia groups who had stopped sharing their
profits from protection fees (krishi or "roofs") with them. During his extensive
interviews with Chechen and Russian mafia leaders, Klebnikov learned that
Chechens owned many restaurants and casinos in Moscow. Berezovsky's own
interactions with the Chechens began when he hired them, rather than the
Moscow-based Solntsevo mafia, to protect his car dealership Logovaz.11
Klebnikov acquired tapes of intercepted telephone conversations between
Berezovsky and Movladi Udugov (a Chechen deputy minister in the Maskhadov
administration) that suggest that the Chechens' series of kidnappings of Russian
and foreign visitors to the tiny Caucasian republic were contrived. Ostensibly as
a crass publicity stunt, Berezovsky apparently arranged the kidnappings and later
Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organized Crime 453
paid ransom to the Chechens to free the captives. Whereas other Russians traveling to Chechnya did so only under heavy security, Berezovsky frequently flew
back and forth without even one bodyguard.
Klebnikov describes other shady incidents in which Berezovsky was apparently involved, including the attempt to murder Gusinsky (the "Faces-in-theSnow" incident in December 1994), the murder of Listyev (who sought to break
Berezovsky's advertising monopoly with the television station ORT), the abrupt
firing of Alexander Lebed as secretary of the Security Council in October 1996
for his attempts to curb corruption, the abrupt dismissal of Yevgeniy Primakov in
May 1999 as prime minister, the bombings of Moscow apartment buildings in
September 1999, and the promotion of KGB functionary Vladimir Putin to
replace Yeltsin in March 2000 as Russian president.
As a scholar, Klebnikov carefully assesses his sources, citing only information that he has been able to corroborate. Because politics and business in Russia are often conducted orally, with a handshake, Klebnikov taped all of his interviews. He states:
In telling this story, 1 have tried to be conservative in asserting what 1 believe to
be true. Throughout, my sources are noted to allow the reader to judge for himself
their solidity or lack thereof. 1 have left a trail of my research, so that the reader
may be in a position to decide for himself what to believe and what not to believe.12
Like Godfather of the Kremlin, Russian Mafia in America is also a careful
investigation. The authors are James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring. Finckenauer, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University, received a grant from
the National Institute of Justice to study typical crimes committed in the United
States by Soviet and Russian émigrés. He traveled to Moscow in 1990 to discuss
organized crime with Russian scholars at the Academy of Sciences. Waring is an
associate professor of sociology at the Herbert Lehman College, City University
of New York.
Finckenauer and Waring's key argument about Russian organized crime in
America is perhaps not as provocative as it initially sounds. They write that the
"Russian Mafia" is "first, not Russian; second, not a mafia; and third, not even
organized crime"13 When they state that the Russian mafia is not "Russian," they
simply mean that many émigré criminals hail from many of the other former
Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.
Nevertheless, they are still Russian speakers, many of whom grew up in the
Soviet system.
By stating that the Russian mafia is not a mafia, the authors beg the question:
What is a mafia? The generic definition is "a secret organization composed
chiefly of criminal elements and usually held to control racketeering, peddling of
narcotics, gambling, and other illicit activities throughout the world." That definition does seem to fit Russian organized crime.
The claim that the Russian mafia is not "organized" will also strike readers as
rather specious. They simply mean that Russian émigré criminals are not organized in a strictly hierarchical fashion according to families. Rather, they are orga-
454 DEMfOKRATIZATSIYA
nized arbitrarily or by geographical region. They operate in a "mix of opportunistic groupings of individuals, wiith a small number of networks."4 For Finckenauer and Waring a "network" refers lo "connections between individuals, organizations, or other entities" that "engage in joint, reciprocal, preferential, and
mutually supportive actions," which can be "complex or relatively simple."" In
chapter 8, "The Structure of Soviet Émigré Crime," the authors provide intricate
schema lo show that the criminals work together (188-89). Moreover, in their
study of crimes based on level of organization, the authors found that 43 percent
involved offenses carried out by "two or more affiliated persons," and 31 percent
(or twenty-one crimes) were executed by criminal organizations. The authors
appear lo split hairs in stating that "although the criminals involved might not
have been engaged in organized crime, they had created an organizational entry
whose sole purpose was lo carry out crimes. Such entity is, indeed, a criminal
organization."16 In short, it appears that Russian organized crime is organized,
since the criminals do operate systematically, in a structured fashion.
Finckenauer and Waring go on lo stress the magnitude of Russian organized
crime, which further undercuts their argument. The majority of the crimes perpetrated in the United States had "sizeable financial impacts"; 60 percent of them
"involved losses via fraud or theft of $ 100,000 or more, and 16 percent involved
losses of $2.5 million or more."7 Lüke Klebnikov, Finckenauer and Waring attest
lo the tight, symbiotic relationship among business, crime, and politics in Russia. "Organized crime is much more sophisticated and powerful in Russia than it
is almost anywhere else in the world," they write.18
Also like Klebnikov, Finckenauer and Wang remind readers that organized
crime is difficult and dangerous to study, unlike juvenile delinquency or other
types of crime. The typical tools of the criminologist-observation, surveys,
interviews, samples, and questionnaires-are nearly impossible lo use. Therefore
the authors joined the Tri-state Joint Soviet Émigré Organized Crime Project lo
identify the extent of Russian émigré crime within the tri-state region of New
York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In this way, they had unique access lo surveillance, informants, undercover investigation, intelligence reports, telephone
records, and public information such as indictments and newspaper reports.
Finckenauer, Waring, and Klebnikov are lo be applauded for their courage in
exposing Russian organized crime. In the course of his investigations of Berezovsky's shenanigans, Klebnikov received warnings that he was jeopardizing his
personal safety, given the oligarch's ties with mafia hit men.
Another investigative reporter, Robert Friedman, actually received death
threats from at least two Mafia bosses for his exposés of their activities in the
United States: Budapest-based Semion Mogilevich and Vyacheslav Ivankov from
his prison cell. In his book Red Mafia, Friedman claims that the Russian mafia
differs from the Italian Cosa Nostra. Whereas the Italians usually refrain from
harming journalists, prosecutors, judges, and innocent family members, the Russians will-in the words of a retired New York City policeman-shoot anyone
` just lo see if their gun works.`9 Friedman is the author of Zealots for Zion:
Inside Israel 's West Bank Settlement and has written numerous articles on Russ-
Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organized Crime 455
ian mobsters in Details, Vanity Fair, and New York. He impresses upon readers
the degree to which the Russian mafia is already deeply entrenched in the United States (especially Brighton Beach, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las
Vegas, and Denver) and overseas (in far-flung cities such as Moscow, Hong Kong,
Bangkok, Bogotá, and Toronto). It is apparently involved in a wide variety of
activities such as car theft, prostitution, gasoline bootlegging, arms smuggling,
cocaine and heroin trafficking, extortion (even of players in the National Hockey League), and an array of sophisticated white-collar computer crimes such as
counterfeiting, credit card schemes, and insurance frauds.
Friedman provides colorful portraits of key Russian mafia leaders such as Marat
Balagula, Vyacheslav Ivankov, Monya Elson, and Semion Mogilevich, many of
whom he interviewed in prisons and gaudy strip bars in Brighton Beach and Miami.
Friedman helps readers to understand the sizeable obstacles that the FBI faces.
Given the global scale of Russian organized crime, the FBI simply cannot combat it effectively without international cooperation. Each sovereign country has
its own laws that must be followed. Friedman uses Israel as an example. He cites
a senior State Department official, Jonathan Winer: "There is not a major Russian organized crime figure who we are tracking who does not also carry an Israelí
passport .1120 Ten percent of Israel's five million Jews are now Russian, according
to the New York City police.21 Since Israel will not extradite their citizens (of
Russian nationality), U.S. law enforcement authorities cannot prosecute the Russian criminals active in the United States, thereby weakening their ability to deter
mafia members from committing future crimes. Other citizens from Eastern
Europe and Eurasia with unsavory backgrounds continue to emigrate to the United States, because U.S. immigration officials cannot screen them, lacking legal
access to their criminal records.
Red Mafia complements Finckenauer's and Waring's more scholarly and dispassionate study. Friedman writes colorfully and wittily, plying readers with rich
anecdotal information.
In The Merger, Jeffrey Robinson goes further than the abovementioned four
authors in emphasizing the increasing cooperation among disparate criminal
organizations in several countries, including the Sicilian Mafiosi, the Chinese Triads, the Russian, Hungarian, and Czech "mafiyas," and organized crime groups
from Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Thailand, and Vietnam, to name a few. Robinson is the international best-selling author of eighteen books, including the
authoritative work The Laundrymen. He has served as keynote speaker on money
laundering for the United Nations, Interpol, U.S. Customs, the FBI, and other
organizations.
As he points out, while these groups' core activities remain the same-car
theft, drug trafficking, fraud in all its guises, alien smuggling, weapons trafficking, counterfeit production and distribution, murder, kidnapping, extortion,
money laundering, and the smuggling and sale of nuclear materials-organized
criminals flourish in the global markets of transparent borders and meaningless
trade restrictions. Unlike their predecessors, they do not limit themselves to single forms of ¡Ilegal activity, but deal in anything and everything that can make
456 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
money for them. Unless jurisdictional barriers can be eliminated to allow law
enforcement authorities in those countries to pool information, the situation will
only worsen, Robinson warns.
Disraeli may dissuade us from high expectations, but Henry David Thoreau's
words also warrant attention: "It is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with
more expectation. Nothing was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood"22 If we
want to curb international organized crime, we must expect that we can. All five
books reviewed here take us a step closer to solutions by raising our awareness
of Russian organized crime, challenging some widely held assumptions, and suggesting more stringent methods of law enforcement. All would be suitable for
courses in Russian politics, sociology, and international relations. Undergraduate
students tend to favor the sprightly writing styles of Freeland, Klebnikov, and
Friedman. Freeland's book would be especially useful, given its detailed chronology and list of key individuals. For further coverage, readers may also want to
consult Russian and Post-Soviet Organized Crime (The International Library of
Criminology, Criminal Justice and Penology), edited by Mark Galeotti; The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy by Federico Varese;
Bandits, Gangsters and the Mafia: Russia, the Baltic States and the CIS Since
1991 by Martin McCauley; The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia,
by David E. Hoffman; Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier, by Matthew Brzezinski; and for more general background, Transnational Criminal Organizations, Cyber Crime, and Money Laundering: A Handbook for Law Enforcement Officers, Auditors, and Financial
Investigators, by James R. Richards.
NOTES
1. P. Lilley, Dirty Dealing: the Untold Truth about Global Money Laundering (London, 2000), 39.
2. Lilley.
3. P. Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York, 2000), 5.
4. Ibid., 320.
5. Ibid., 319.
6. Lilley, Dirty Dealing, 27.
7. Klebnikov, 3.
8. Ibid., 59.
9. Ibid., 76.
10. Ibid., 319.
11. Ibid., 12
12. Ibid., xi.
13. James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring, Russian Mafia in America: Immigration,
Culture, and Crime (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xiv.
14. Ibid., 198-99.
15. Ibid., 6.
16. Ibid., 263.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 121.
19. Robert 1. Friedman, Red Mafia: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America
Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organized Crime 457
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000), xvii.
20. Ibid., 277.
21. Ibid.
22. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), vol. 4,
120-21.
Book Reviews
Building Capitalism : The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc, Anders
Áslund . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 508 pp. $27.00
paperback.
Since the collapse of the Soviet erripire in 1989, the world has witnessed the
simultaneous development of new political-economic systems on an unprecedented scale. More than twenty nations emerged from the strictures of communism in the last decade, creating a virtual laboratory of social reconstruction as
their governments launched market-oriented systemic reforms. Anders Áslund, in
his latest book, Building Capitalism, applies his extensive experience, historical
insight, and thorough scholarship te) a comparison of the choices and outcomes
across the East European-Eurasian region through the first decade of reform. He
argues that rapid reform strategies have produced the best results, while gradual
reform has been co-opted by rent-seeking elites, leaving those countries stalled
economically and politically.
Áslund covers twenty-one countries in Building Capitalism: the fifteen former
Soviet republics and six countries of Eastern Europe (excluding the former
Yugoslavia and Albania). If his scope is broad, it is also deep, comparing the
countries on output, liberalization, stabilization, privatization, social welfare,
state intervention, and political participation. This comprehensive structure
allows broad groupings to emerge, despite the great variation in experiences.
Áslund suggests that three basic reform models are evident: the radical reformers (Central Europe, the Baltic nations, Georgia, Armenia, and Kyrgystan), which
have created democratic, privatized, market-oriented systems; the gradual
reformers (Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan), which are
stalled in semidemocratic, semiprivatized, rent-seeking societies; and the nonreformers (Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), which have restored statecontrolled economies under dictatorial rule. He finds that both growth and social
welfare are highest in the radical reform countries, while the gradual reformers
have fared worse even than the non-reformers, exhibiting the slowest growth and
highest inequality.
The greatest strengths of this book lie in its complexity. Áslund weaves an
intricate tapestry of data and interpretation, economics and politics, history and
current events. In his zeal to "debunk the myths" of transformation, however, he
too often deflects attention from this complexity with sweeping, dramatic conclusions or polemical arguments. Rather than a capstone to the debate over which
transformation strategy is "better," Áslund's book is best viewed as a valuable
catalyst for continuing scholarship in the field given its impressive compilation
of comparative data and valuable insights on methodological problems.
Building Capitalism stands out for its blend of quantitative and qualitative
analysis. Whereas students of the Soviet bloc once suffered from the total absence
458
Book Reviews 459
of meaningful statistics, scholars now face the opposite problem: a flood of data
that must be examined carefully for validity and comparability. Aslund bolsters
his narrative with relevant measurements on countless topics but clearly explains
their strengths and weaknesses. As he cautions, critical analysis of official statistics can be "treacherous," yet it is vital for developing a clearer picture of what has
occurred during the transition-not only for scholars, but especially for policymakers. Some leaders, he argues, overestimated the scope of economic crisis
because of poor statistics and became reluctant to implement radical reforms.
In one of the most original arguments of the book, Áslund contends that our
view of output statistics over the last decade should be completely reconsidered.
Again, one must look beyond the provocative claim that "the great postcommunist output collapse is a myth" to the detailed, perceptive analysis beneath it.
Drawing on his knowledge of the communist system, the author railes substantive questions about how output has been evaluated. In particular, Áslund contends that contributions to GDP from the unofficial econorny, admittedly difficult
to quantify, are not sufficiently weighed into assessments of change, producing
an undervaluation of output in certain countries. He also suggests that part of the
output collapse belongs on the positive side of the ledger, as it helped eliminate
"value detracting" activities (e.g., unproductive manufacturing and trade subsidies) embedded in the centrally planned system. Certainly, not everyone will
agree with the numbers Aslund ultimately presents in the "Revision of GDP
Development in Transition," or with all his conclusions regarding trends. Nevertheless, his original work challenges others to address the peculiarities of the communist legacy and lays a foundation for building more satisfactory measurements
that reflect them.
Building Capitalism, although rich with charts and tables, devotes as much
attention to process as it does to outcomes, recognizing that the politics and economics of transition are inseparable. Áslund explains how different political preconditions (particularly democratization and development of civil society) affected the initiation of reform and how early policy choices, by redistributing power
in distinctive ways, constrained later options. Politics have been decisive,
although not in the way most analysts expected-Áslund's study suggests that
radical reformers have been constrained less by popular opinion, labor strikes,
and electoral pressure than by corrupt elites seeking to shape reform to personal
advantage. Notably, the countries that experienced the most frequent changes in
government over the decade (Poland, the Baltics, and Bulgaria) also experienced
the most economic success.
Although Áslund's analysis shows how politics and policies can inhibit
reform, it offers less clarity on what kind of government mechanisms are necessary to support reform. The partial reformers remain hindered by weak (though
bloated) states, unable to fend off predatory elites, enforce equitable tax policies,
or reduce burdensome subsidies. Even the most successful radical reformers lack
state capacity and authority in critical areas, as the privatization process, in particular, has demonstrated. Although destruction of old state institutions may be
essential for placing nations on the more successful track, strategies for building
460
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
new bases of state authority and regulation would seem equally important. How
can stagnating partial reformers establish the political basis for shifting onto a
growth track? Can political instability and unregulated markets promote reform
over the longer term?
Anders Áslund cautions, "A decade is a sufficiently long period to breed clear
perceptions, but too brief to offer trae answers" In Building Capitalism, he has
skilfully analyzed the diverse experience across the region in the first phase of
transformation. This wealth of material provides an invaluable basis for ongoing
study as the transformation process, far from over, heads into its second decade.
JEAN FARNETH BOONE
Georgetown University
The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security , Walter
C. Clemens Jr. Lanham , Maryland : Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
Inc., 2001 . 320 pp. $28.95 textboolk.
In The Baltic Transformed, Walter C. Clemens Jr. presents an exhaustive empirical
overview of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Against the theoretical backdrop of complexity theory, the fundamental thesis of which is that the
ability of a people to self-organize plays a significant role in state "survival and
prosperity," Clemens asks why these tiny, multiethnic states have fared so well
under postcommunism, despite the wholesale repression experienced during the
Soviet past and the pressures exerted by the Russians in the present? Indeed, during the past decade, each of these societies succeeded on a variety of fronts: they
are consolidated democracies and are among the newest entrants into the Western
security alliance; they presumably will be among the first Eastern European countries invited into an enlarged European Union as its membership expands in 2004;
and their economies rank as among the freest in the world. In late 2002, the Baltic
countries' economies ranked among the world's most liberalized, with Estonia tying
the United States for sixth place among the world's freest economies.
Among the reasons posited by Clemens for the success of the Baltic peoples
is their adoption of Western politico-cultural values, their capacity to selforganize for mutual gain, and their ability to "raise their `fitness,"' while nearby great powers such as Russia suffered from imperial overreach and declining
"fitness." Baltic self-organization was made possible by the existence of a welleducated populace whose average investment in higher education surpassed that
of the fifteen states of the European Union. In addition, the Baltic states rank
among the world's most ardent mass media consumers and among Europe's most
computerized and Internet-savvy societies, providing Baltic peoples with the
potential to fully exploit these "tools of openness" for common political ends.
However, while discussing the immportance of the "Baltic example" for spurring
independence movements elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Clemens gives
Book Reviews 461
slight attention to the Eastern European "snowball effect" as a cause of the Baltic
states' drive toward independence. Clemens also does not definitively resolve a
most vexing question: With the Soviet extermination of all forms of societal selforganization, why did the Baltic peoples-relative to other captive nations of the
former USSR-emerge from the suffocation of communism with a participant
political culture quickly blooming forth? Clemens does argue that, acide from the
favorable socioeconomic indicators of fitness that are enjoyed by Baltic societies,
it is their proximity to the West and their acceptance of Western values of "selfreliance" and "individual dignity" that explain the rapid transition to dernocracy
in the Baltic states. Although certainly these factors are significant ones, might
their participant acceptance of democratic institutions also be explained by their
strong penchant to be free from Russian influence? The difficult path to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the early 1980s was made more effortless by Western promises of full inclusion into European economic and political institutions.
Could not, then, the Baltic transition be motivated in part by a strong desire to be
included in Western political, economic, and military structures, thereby freeing
the Baltic peoples from Russian hegemony forever? Although Clemens offers a
detailed, panoramic chapter on Russian-"Near Abroad" relations, that factor does
not receive explicit treatment.
However, these minor shortcomings can be overlooked, as among the many
other positive facets of the study is Clemens' richly detailed examination of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each individually elaborating on the many unique political and social features, historical curiosities, and strengths of these three tiny
countries. Indeed, to the chagrin of many, social scientists in the past have often
discussed the three states as a monolithic group, sustaining the impression that one
could be interchanged for another. Here, however, the author has offered ample
comparative data on each of the three Baltic states, from election results to educational outcomes, e-mail access to energy usage. Although at times the historical
detail in particular becomes somewhat burdensome, Clemens has provided a readable primer on the Baltic states and the larger Eastern European region.
Clemens should be lauded as well for his efforts to compare the Baltic states
with other small states that emerged from colonial dependency to achieve high
levels of socioeconomic and democratic development, such as the East Asian
"Tigers." He finds that although in some respects the Baltic states were better off
than the East Asian newly independent countries, the costs of Soviet imperial rule
were much more onerous than elsewhere. In particular, the Soviet legacy imposed
substantial costs in terms of a state-fostered egalitarian culture of dependency, as
well as deep, interethnic divisions (due to Russian in-migration following Soviet annexation in 1940) that continue to cause considerable problems for the political development of at least two of the three Baltic states, Estonia and Latvia.
Indeed, as the author rightly points out, this latter factor explains why these two
states rejected Lithuania's more inclusive approach to citizenship.
The Baltic Transformed is an engaging and impressive attempt at both empirical investigation and theory building. As such, the study enlightens our understanding of international relations; it points out the limitations of other theoretical
462
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
frameworks in the field, while positing an alternative one that aids considerably in
our understanding of events in postcommunist Eastern Europe. In the end, however, Clemens' research-as the author readily agrees-falls slightly short of its goal,
as it, too, suffers from some of the same faults as the rival theoretical approaches.
THOMAS E. ROTNEM
Southern Polytechnic State University
The Revolt of the Filmmakers : The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the
Fall of the Soviet Film Industry, George Faraday. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000. 252 pp. $ 18.95 paperback.
George Faraday spent about a year ]living in Moscow in the mid-1990s, working
as a journalist and English teacher while researching the state of post-Soviet cinema for his Ph.D. The Revolt of the Filmmakers, based on his dissertation, examines the parabola of the Soviet film industry in the last years of the Soviet Union
and the first decade or so after the Soviet Union's dissolution, from the dizzying
freedom of May 1986 through the "boom years" of production, 1989-91, to the
crash, and beyond. From reading the cinema press and interviewing people who
worked in the industry, mainly on the creative side, Faraday recounts a sequence
of events and describes a hodgepodge of high-minded motives, naiveté, arrogance, and cynical exploitation occasionally farcical, often dismaying, and altogether understandable given Russian and Soviet culture and politics. Indeed, his
story fits right into the peculiar late-Soviet cinema genre known as "sad comedies," director Eldar Ryazanov's term for a category he himself perfected.
Faraday rightly identifies the core problem that Soviet filmmakers faced as the
old system disintegrated or, more accurately, failed to face: the "latent contradiction between [filmmakers'] pursuit of creative autonomy and their willingness to
respond to the desires of the mass public" (7). Almost all of the best writers and
directors had for years chafed at state intervention into their work, whether bureaucratic or explicitly ideological. They wanted, they claimed, freedom from state
interference, to make movies that would "speak the truth." In 1986 they got their
chance, thanks to Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika. The Cinematographers' Union became the first official cultural body to hurtle headlong onto
Gorbachev's bandwagon: at its Fifth Congress in May it voted out all the old guard
Brezhnev-leftovers and voted in a group of innovative, relatively nonconformist
filmmakers with the goal of dismantling state supervision and censorship.
It was an exhilarating moment. Cameras rolled for new films; theaters showed
older films that had been suppressed; audiences eagerly rushed to both. It was also
short-lived, done in by a combination of economic factors, structural contradictions
within the industry, and the cultural-psychological mindsets of individuals. Faraday explores the role played by each--roles with roots in the past, as he indicateswith reference to the theories of cultural production developed by Howard Becker,
Book Reviews 463
Pierre Bourdieu, Katherine Verdery, and others, and while 1 find much of the theoretical framework heavy-handed and graceless, it does explain a lot.
Basically, the lame system that suppressed Soviet filmmakers protected them.
As with other aspects of the Soviet economy of shortage, audience demand had
never been the highest priority within Soviet cinema, although studios expected
their movies to show a profit, and vox populi mattered more than Faraday
acknowledges. Still, the system funded and distributed movies based less on
anticipated box office returns than on extra-cinematic considerations: the political importance of a film, its treatment of significant social or historical issues, its
conformity to or deviation from official standards of morality and aesthetics, its
potential for enhancing Soviet prestige abroad.
After 1986, free to do what they pleased, Soviet filmmakers exploited that freedom by overturning taboos in a wave of retrospective examinations of the past
and grimly realistic portrayals of contemporary life. Their initial enthusiasm
quickly sated, however, audiences who were all too familiar with that reality
chose to stay home. Bad became worse as distribution shifted to newly established cooperatives, which sought profits by screening the cheapest movies
Hollywood had to offer, in decaying, dirty theaters with rock-hard seats. Viewers
voted with their backsides, watching television in their relatively clean, safe, and
comfortable living rooms.
The inflation of 1993 further degraded the situation, since it wiped out ordinary people's buying power. Filmmakers, hard-pressed to earn profits at home,
attempted to appeal to international audiences, seeking outside investment and
hoping desperately for foreign distribution: as Faraday notes, one showing of a
Russian movie on a European television station could earn as much money as all
revenues from domestic distribution. But even when they found the resources to
compete with foreign products, Russian filmmakers didn't necessarily have the
technical and aesthetic background to do so successfully, or the experience to
gauge what foreign audiences would like. In the words of another astute commentator on post-communist cinema, Christina Stojanova, "the magic formula of
a universally marketable hybrid, made with Western money and Russian artistic
sensitivity seemed impossible to find" ("The New Russian Cinema," Kinema [Fall
19981 <www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/sto982.htm>).
Over a period of decades, the industry's failure to "rationalize the [cinematic]
production process" had led to inconsistent technical quality, slow rate of completion, and a growing disconnect between filmmakers, who could control production up to a point but could in no way control distribution, and audiencesall problems that outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Similarly long-lived were
values dating back to prerevolutionary times. Members of the Russian (and Soviet) intelligentsia, filmmakers among them, tended to link appreciation of high culture with a sense of moral superiority (21); most intelligentsy also subscribed to
the educational mission of art. Building on the work of many other scholars, as
Faraday acknowledges, he thoughtfully examines the specific relevance of those
notions after formal restrictions disappeared-how they influenced filmmakers'
choices of subjects, styles, and genres. Given the combination of systemic flaws
464
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
and cultural blinders, it seems nearly miraculous that Soviet studios managed to
produce as many enjoyable and even excellent films as they did, and that even a
handful of good ones emerged in the last decade.
1 suppose that if 1 have any quarrel with Faraday's book, it has to do with his
ready acceptance of disgruntled judgments articulated by understandably disaffected film professionals scrambling to save their livelihoods and their selfesteem. For instante, a number of his interviewees complain about lack of professionalism in Soviet cinema. To my eye, possibly corrupted by watching an
enormous number of movies from the 1950s and 1960s, and quite a few from
later years, Soviet films do not betray lack of professionalism so much as a different and not inherently disadvantageous aesthetic orientation. Acting is consistently good. Editing is skillful, if show-paced; camerawork adroit, with a clear
preferente for close-up ("psychological" camera). Story unes are admittedly
leisurely, by Western standards often flaccid, and mire-en-scéne is uneven,
though it can be compelling. But Soviet studios turned out some extremely interesting and enjoyable films between 1956 and 1967, and a fair number during the
grayer Brezhnev years: people went to see them not only because there was nothing else to do (though lack of alternatives certainly played a role). Somehow that
reality is obscured in Revolt of the Filmmakers.
Still, Faraday is far more right than wrong in assessing the problems besetting
Russian cinema since the mid-1980s, the period on which he concentrates. In the
last few years film production has ricen somewhat, giving hope to those of us who
care about Russian filmmaking. For the years with which Faraday is chiefly concerned, his analysis is in the main lucid, fair, and sadly accurate.
JOSEPHINE WOLL
Howard University
Distant Neighbors Volume Two: Japanese- Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Hiroshi Kimura. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe,
Inc., 200(1. 376 pp. $89.95 hardcover.
Why has there been less progress in Russia's relations with Japan over the past
decade and a half than in Russia's relations with China, the Republic of Korea,
and other countries? To what extent was this attributable to failure first by Gorbachev then by Yeltsin to understand the potential benefits of improving relations
with Japan and to support needed territorial concessions? To what extent were
they constrained by domestic politics?
Did Japanese policymakers understand and react appropriately to the significant changes that were taking place first in the USSR and then in Russia and to
the opportunities and challenges they presented? Did they show a realistic appreciation of the intentions of policymakers in Moscow and the constraints under
which they were operating?
Book Reviews 465
Those are only a few of the questions that are addressed in Distant Neighbors,
Hiroshi Kimura's monumental and impressive two-volume study of relations
between Russia and Japan . The second volume, the focus of this review, analyzes
the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods.
Hiroshi Kimura, professor at the International Research Center for Japanese
Studies in Kyoto, is eminently well qualified to address this subject . He is Japanese, fluent in Russian and English . He has spent a lifetime studying Russia and its
relations with Japan . Kimura is known to have close relations with Japanese policy makers , which provides him unique insights into the thinking behind Tokyo's
policy toward Russia . These insights make his work invaluable to specialists. Nonspecialists will benefit from reading Kimura' s analysis, which reflects his broad
knowledge of Western international relations literature and his deep understanding of historical , cultural , and domestic political factors influencing foreign policy decision making and negotiating behavior in Moscow and Tokyo.
Kimura argues that progress under Gorbachev was impeded not only by wideranging Soviet domestic opposition to a territorial concession but also by Gorbachev ' s own attitude (85-94). Gorbachev understood Japan ' s importance better than
his predecessors, who tended to treat Japan as an appendage of the United States.
However, it was only late in his terco in office that Gorbachev carne to recognize
that progress in relations with Japan would not be possible without some movement
forward on their territorial dispute. Even then , however, he was more inclined to
make changes in tactics than to make any meaningful concession (47-51).
There was a brief period at the very beginning of Yeltsin ' s term when he could
have made a territorial concession . However, that window of opportunity soon
was closed by the rice of rightist forces. Their growing influence over policy
helped to persuade Yeltsin to announce a last-minute postponement of his planned
September 1992 visit to Tokyo.
Despite the territorial stalemate , there were signs in the late 1990s that
Moscow and Tokyo were interested in improving their relations . Kimura argues
that Japan ' s desire to improve relations with Russia was sparked by growing concern about an increasingly powerful China and about instability on the Korean
peninsula and elsewhere in Asia (204-05). Russia wanted better relations with
Japan to counterbalance its closer relations with China and pressure from the
West. Another motive was to seek Japanese cooperation in the development of
the Russian Far East (183, 187, 230).
Tokyo's new interest in improved relations with Moscow was reflected in a
July 1997 speech by then Prime Minister Hashimoto. Encouraged by Hashimoto's speech and other initiatives , Yeltsin proposed at their November 1997 Krasnoiarsk summit that Russia and Japan conclude a peace treaty by the year 2000.
When he made this proposal, Yeltsin did not deny that a peace treaty would
include a resolution of the territorial dispute. By the following November, however, pressure from Foreign Minister Primakov forced an ailing Yeltsin to reject
a peace treaty proposal made by Hashimoto the previous spring (279).
Kimura suggests thatYeltsin ' s initially conciliatory attitude reflected his desire
to ensure his place in history as a "wise leader" (212). It is not clear, however,
466
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
that Yeltsin would have agreed to a territorial concession if he had not become
ill. In another section, Kimura seems to recognize this point when he observes
that although both Gorbachev and Yeltsin understood the importante of improving relations with Japan, it is doubtful that either was convinced that a territorial
concession was necessary (276-77).
Hashimoto's proposal, rejected by Yeltsin, envisaged that Russia would
renounce sovereignty over the disputed islands in return for administrative control. That proposal downplayed the iLslands' symbolic value to Russia, implying
that they are important primarily for material and strategic reasons, a debatable
assumption.
Tokyo and Moscow still are interested in improving their mutual relations.
However, each feels that the other country needs it more than it needs the other
and that the other side ought to make concessions. Kimura suggests that a territorial concession would bring Russia a number of benefits, including greater
access to Japan's vast economic capabilities and to its scientific, technological,
and management know-how, as well as the support of "the region's dominant
power," Japan, for Russia's "full-fledged membership in the Asia-Pacific community" (126-27, 211). Kimura stresses that Japan is "in a fortunate position to
be able to choose rather freely, from a long list" of possible future trading partners and that Russia is only one option (244).
The problem is that Russians do not necessarily share Kimura's perspective.
Many Russians believe that growing concern about China will induce Japan to
cooperate with Russia and to support its active participation in Asia-Pacific
affairs with or without a territorial concession. As far as economic cooperation
is concerned, Japan is not Russia's only prospective partner, although it is an
important one.
PEGGY FALKENHEIM MEYER
Simon Fraser University
Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story, Andrei Golovnev and Gail
Osherenko. Ithaca and London : Cornell University Press, 1999. 176 pp.
$29.95 hardcover.
The Nenets are among the thirty small groups of people of the North who Nave
preserved their traditional reindeer-herding way of life in the face of intense gas
exploration on the Yamal Peninsula, which by 1996 was scaling down for economic reasons. Nevertheless, renewed exploration is only a matter of time, and
if the reindeer pastures are overgrazed or curtailed, the Nenets' way of life is
threatened. When faced with outside pressure in the past, the Nenets retreated
to the remote tundra, but in the 1990s such a retreat was no assurance of cultural survival.
Siberian Survival tries to answer a number of questions, among them: "How
Book Reviews 467
did the Nenets emerge at the end of the twentieth century with fewer social ills
and a greater sense of community self-worth than that which appears to be the
case among other arctic indigenous peoples?" (p. x). The authors decided to focus
on leadership and gender and on twentieth-century rebellions against Soviet rule,
topics that have been little studied. They begin with the early history of the
Nenets, which they rather cleverly structure around the myth "Five Yaptiks" about
the origins of one of the Nenets clans. The material about rebellions in Soviet
times is certainly new, but there seems to be too much detail relative to topics of
gender and leadership. Men and women have distinctly separate roles when tending reindeer. In the villages, in part because of the absence of men who are with
the reindeer, women are the leaders, and the women are better educated. Apparently, however, the younger men are in leadership positions at conferences, furthering the interests of Siberian ethnic groups. The strains this might put on traditional social roles are barely mentioned. An example of the changes brought
about by education or the lack of it appears in the authors' preface (p. ix), where
they write of a Nenets elder whose son is a surgeon and whose grandson does not
speak the Nenets language, although bis grandfather is teaching it to him. 1 for
one wanted more such detail.
The authors assert that six assaults on Nenets culture-"the taking of property and reindeer..., the occupation of traditional Lands..., the persecution of
shamans..., the institution of forced labor..., the denial of voting rights..., and
the forced removal of children to boarding schools..." have failed to destroy "the
herding complex and culture" (144-45). They seem to believe that this culture
should survive because it has endured for hundreds of years. The authors note
that Nenets culture has survived because it is adaptable, and their very last sentence is, "We, as outsiders, must allow them the space for adaptation and the
opportunity to retain control over their lives" (150). In the authors' view, the current trend toward vesting the Nenets with property rights to the land and the oil
and gas underneath it, along with local decision making, is also a key to survival,
although few Nenets have opted for the rights they currently have. At present,
the Nenets sovkhozy also survive under the gas companies in the area. The
authors count on national and international public opinion to make the corporations consider the interests of the indigenous population, but they have scarcely
done so to this point.
The beautiful color pictures in the book show a reindeer-herding life lived at
the most basic level. If the authors have not romanticized the traditional life, it is
hard to believe that young people would prefer it to one that would give them
other options. Some data, not in this book, suggest that they do not, making questionable the idea that property rights contain a solution. The book has material
for a debate, and though there could have been more ethnographic material, it is
interesting on that level.
ETHEL DUNN
Highgate Road Social Science Research Station
Berkeley, California
468 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
Making Russian Democracy Work: Social Capital, Economic Development,
and Democratization, Christopher Marsh . Lewiston, New York: The Edwin
Mellen Press , Ltd., 2000 . 202 pp. $ 109.95 hardcover.
One of the more intriguing questions in world politics today is whether Russia
will be able to consolidate its young and still very fragile democracy. The developments that have occurred lately show signs of clear attempts from Russian state
authorities to focus their strengths on the consolidation of state power rather than
on the consolidation of democracy. A recent development in the media sector is
only one of many that point in this direction. Swedish media in covering the
hostage situation at the theater at Melnikov Ulitsa in Moscow reported that Russian journalists were instructed by government agencies to erase everything in
their texts covering the police use of gas to stop the terrorists.1 That limitation on
freedom of expression and freedomi of the press indeed poses a serious threat
toward the fragile Russian democracy. A highly justified question therefore is
whether Russia will be able to overcome the many obstacles it currently faces and
make democracy work; that is the inquiry that poses the point of departure for
Dr. Marsh's study Making Russian Democracy Work: Social Capital, Economic
Development, and Democratization. The book, which is devoted to the prospecta
for further democratization in the Russian Federation, investigates the impact of
history as well as social capital, socioeconomic development, and regime support
on the democratization process.2
Perhaps the most important contr:ibution of the book is its attempt to trace the
foundation on which Russian democracy rests, focusing on the people who make
up the newly democratic Russia, and their readiness to support their political system through participation and understanding. It is a focus that has been in the
shadow of the core of democracy, the institutions, for far too long. By combining an understanding of Russian culture from the historical as well as contemporary perspective with statistical analysis based on a cross-regional approach of
Russia's eighty-nine regions and posisible requisites of democratization, the study
and its conclusions become solid and trustworthy.
The theoretical perspective rests mainly on the scholarship of Seymor Martin
Lipset and Robert D. Putnam, who respectively have devoted their research to the
explanation of functioning democracies and the necessary prerequisites of
democratization and consolidation processes. The study begins with a historical
exposé of Russia's troubled transition to democracy. It proceeds through the turbulent development of the Russian state, characterized by struggle and autocracy, starting with the rise of the Kievan state in the late 800s and ending with the
Russian democracy under Boris Yeltsin at the end of the twentieth century. The
period is explained as an evolutionary path toward democracy, with an interregnum in the shape of the seventy years of communist dictatorship. After the first
two chapters, Marsh invites us to follow his search for Russian democracy and
its prospects for further development through a cross-regional investigation of the
impact of socioeconomic developrnent, regime support, and social capital on
Russian democratization.
Book Reviews 469
In defining and assessing the Russian democracy, Marsh turns to authorities
in the crea such as Joseph Schumpeter, Anthony Downs, and Robert Dahl, where
he decides to go with Dahl's criteria for functional democracy, polyarchy. This
choice is legitimized by the fact that Dahl's criteria are more flexible and include
an aspect that is ignored or not considered explicitly by the other two scholars,
namely civic activity. That is an amendment to the minimalist democratic theory
(primarily represented by Schumpeter), and is necessary for understanding the
complex Russian situation. Marsh then concludes that Russia meets the most
stringent definition of democracy, and asks to what degree the Russian Federation can be considered a democratic state.
To measure the degree of democracy, Vanhanen's Index of Democracy3 is
modified into fitting a cross-regional examination of Russia's eighty-nine regions,
using indicators based on electoral participation (the 1996 Russian presidential
elections, with the turnout rates for the first and second rounds of the election
averaged together, and the 1995 Duma elections) and political competition (the
level of presidential competition and the level of parliamentary competition).
Based on this analysis, there is no doubt that much of the country has a strong
democratic base, even though several areas are less democratic. The most fascinating finding, though, is the identification of two distinct patterns of democracy. The first pattern, associated with support for the regime, demokratiya, is related to the popular perception of the word "democracy," while the other pattern,
labelled narodovlastie (literally translated as "rule by the people") is associated
with the idea of democracy. The analysis, supported by other recent research in
the field, shows an evident cleavage between the popular perception of the word
democracy, and the beliefs supportive of democracy.
The limited discussion of the implications of those two patterns is the only real
drawback of the book. That was not an explicit aim of the study, but the public
notion of democracy is an important part of the assessment of whether or not
democracy is functioning and it deserves far more consideration.
Language has immediate implications for the human construction of identity,
of sorting out what and who people are. That is especially important in studies of
transitional countries such as Russia. Language is a value intermediary as well as
a carrier of ideas, as it brings about a notion or a picture connected to certain
actions, certain competence, and certain values. Because of this, it creates an
expectation of a certain attitude and action. And because of the multiple functions
of language, it is necessary to follow through the public notion of expressions and
words, of conceptions and ideas, of references.4 Overlooking the difficulties of
connecting the use of words to a deeper understanding of ideas, is not a problem
which is specific for this study, but is a general weakness in contemporary democratic studies. Studies by Marsh and others show that part of establishing a sound
belief in democracy in Russia is to put the negative connotation of demokratiya
in relation to what democracy (narodovlastie) really involves.
The exploration of the relationship between socioeconomic development and
the Index of Democratization shows some very interesting and contradictory
results. The analysis finds that highly industrialized and better educated regions
470 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
tend to be Iess democratic and tend to have lower levels of electoral participation
and less competitive elections than do the less developed ones (-.507). That is
interesting because research about rnodernization shows mounting evidence that
modernization, here interpreted as socioeconomic development, leads to democratization. But what is really interesting with the negative correlation found in
Marsh's study is the surprisingly positive interpretation of it. Marsh attributes the
lower voter turnout in the more industrial areas to voter apathy and voter consensus. The phenomenon of voter apathy, which often is used to explain decreasing voter turnouts in the Western splhere, is here interpreted as satisfaction with
the situation, something that instinctively ought to be very hard to apply on the
Russian situation. This, 1 dare to say, is a very typical U.S. interpretation that
rarely is found in contemporary European research on voter behavior, in which
voter apathy as seen as an expression of disbelief in the system. Yet another interesting contradiction found in the analysis is that, while the correlation between
the socioeconomic development indicators of industrialization and education is
negative, the socioeconomic development is positively correlated (.462) with support for the newly democratic regime.
Following the analysis of the relationships between socioeconomic development, regime support, and democracy, Marsh turns to social capital and the
impact of civic community on dernocracy. Here he turns to Putnam's Civic
Community index,s which is modifiied to suit the Russian case.' The examination of the relationship between social capital and democracy shows convincing evidente of social capital throughout many of Russia's regions, a conclusion that differs from Putnam's hypotheses on the existence of social capital in
Russia. The correlation (.581) confirmed the hypotheses that social capital is
an important factor in the process of democratic development. Bivariate correlations conducted to measure the strength between the civic community index
and regime support also show a strong and statistically significant correlation,
but here the correlation is negative (-.456).'
The conclusion drawn from the investigations and explorations is that Russian society has deep-rooted democratic aspirations and that there are no major
threats against the consolidation of Russian democracy if the many problems of
the transition are addressed. Thus the future looks bright for the final consolidation of the Russian democracy, which according to Marsh's findings has evolved
for more than a thousand years.
The main objections that come to mind while reading Making Russian
Democracy Work are primarily connected with what might seem to be a far too
positive interpretation of the negative correlations found, and the limited discussion and analysis of the implications of the two patterns of democracy. On
the whole, however, it is a very sollid study-presented in an "easy-to-grasp"
kind of way-about a very complex case. The book endorses a positive
approach to the Russian case, an approach that is refreshing in the light of what
is generally reported about Russian democracy. It is a book well worth reading
for researchers in the field, as well as for people with a general interest in Russia and Russian politics.
Book Reviews 471
NOTES
1. "Kremis demokratiska fernissa rinner av" <http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp> collected
2002-10-30.
2. Socioeconomic development indicators used are "relative wealth of a region's population," "the regions leve] of industrialization," "the regions level of urbanization," and
"the number of newspapers available to a populace."
3. Tatu Vanhanen, Prospects of Democracy: A Study of 172 Countries (London: Routledge, 1997).
4. C. K. Ogden and 1. A. Richards, The Meaning qf Meaning: A Study of the Influence
of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Routledge, 1972).
5. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
6. Indicators used to quantify the amount of social capital in the Russian regions are
"sobranie voting [voting in elections to the regional legislative assemblies], 1993-95,"
"referenda turnout, 1993," "newspaper publishing, 1995," and "clubs and cultural associations, 1996"
7. All correlations are significant at the .001 level of confidence.
ANNA SPÁNNING
Department of Political Science
Karlsbad University, Sweden
The Ransom of Russian Art, John McPhee. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1994 . 192 pp. $ 12.00 paperback.
The story of Norton Dodge is an unlikely and engaging one. As a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, he made numerous trips lo the Soviet Union
at the height of the cold war, ostensibly carrying out research, but his real passion
was the "unofficial" art of Russia that he bought and exponed to the United States
in great quantities. On his visits to all corners of the USSR between 1955 and 1977,
Dodge was able to amass an unparalleled collection of dissident art.
As the title states, this is not a story about the art itself, but about its extraction. In truth, it is equally an examination of the life of dissident artists in the
Soviet Union. McPhee describes how the dissident artists lived during the
Khrushchev and Brezhnev years: their status, their work, and their relationships
with foreigners. He draws on personal interviews with the artists to get the feel
for the society and lifestyle, including the pressures, of the dissident artists who
struggled to create and circulate their unofficial art at a time when doing so posed
dangers to life and limb. The narrative is a "who's who" of Soviet dissident art,
listing almost all of the prominent dissident artists in Russia, most of whom knew
Dodge personally. McPhee also includes descriptions of Dodge and his activities
that are based on interviews with the artists whose works he collected. In addition, he offers a personal impression of the collector, drawing on his own impressions of Dodge and excerpts of their interviews.
Dodge first traveled to the Soviet Union to do research for a book on the role
of women in the Soviet economy. His interest in dissident art quickly became an
472
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
obsession that would last more than two decades, until Dodge felt that the risks
were too great to continue. Although unable to give the artists a public outlet in
their own country, he purchased their works at prices that some would call fair,
others generous. He gave them publicity in the West, at least in certain circles
(public showings were rare, especially at first). Most important, he almost singlehandedly ensured the survival of an entire era of Russian art. One Russian artist
referred to Dodge as "the Lorenzo de Medie¡ of Russian art"
McPhee's descriptions of Dodge conjure up images of the typical absentminded professor and a gentleman who, like all collectors, is a little bit crazy.
Dodge is also a contradiction. He cannot find his way around the St. Louis airport, but was somehow able successfully to smuggle more than 9,000 works of
art out of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. Dodge's total lack of
organization is evident in descriptions of his sprawling farmstead, Cremona Farm,
in Maryland. His collection of dissident art stood there for many years, amid a
chaos that would make most readers cringe. Dodge's so-called filing system is as
bad as it gets. Despite the extra challenge his tendency toward disorganization
may have posed to Dodge, he was still very adept at finding contacts in Russia.
Despite less-than-perfect Russian language skills, he could take a bus or a tram
to a Moscow suburb, armed only with a scrap of paper containing a name and an
address and a flashlight, as the bulos in the corridors of the apartment buildings
were often out.
McPhee (or, rather, Dodge himself) leaves some substantial questions unanswered. Where did Dodge get the money for the art and for his large estate at Cremona? What was the extent of Dodge's collaboration with the CIA? How was he
able to get so many works of art, some of them far too large to be transported
inconspicuously or by a single person, out of the country? Clues and partial
answers to these questions are given to the reader but left ambiguous enough to
kindle reader curiosity and inspire further rumination.
Along with the character descriptions of Dodge and the lifestyles of the artists
with whom he associated, McPhee's book contains more than fifty color plates
of the dissident artists discussed in the book. The plates contain prime examples
of art by the artists mentioned and serve as a sample of what one might see on a
visit to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, which houses Dodge's
collection of Soviet dissident art.
PHILLIP A. STARLING
Johns Hopkins University
Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago , Silver Age
Moscow, and Meiji Osaka , Blair A. Ruble. Cambridge , UK: Woodrow Wilson Press and Cambridge University Press, 2001 . 448 pp. $40.00 hardcover.
The idea of writing a book comparing Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka at the turn
of the twentieth century may seem bizarre. The question may arise: What for?
Book Reviews 473
What might this comparison tell us about these cities, or anything else for that
matter? And, generally, how can one compare such different places, communities, and cultures?
After reading Second Metropolis, I believe 1 have the answers to those questions. In essence, the book is about Russia and contemporary debate on that country in the West, primarily in America. It is about how we should conceptualize
Russia's difference from the rest of the world and whether the distance between
the Japanese and American political traditions and cultures is bigger or smaller
than that between those of America and Russia. It is also about whether the Soviet experience should be seen as part of Russia's movement along the road to
modernity or as a detour away from it.
The starting idea is at once simple and subtle. Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka
were at the time the second major cities in their respective countries. They were
not, however, capitals, and were not under the immediate control of national
bureaucracies. They were the fastest-growing cities, the most dazzling, puzzling,
innovative, and creative centers-in a word, they were symbols of everything
modem and perplexing that existed in the countries concerned before World War
1. By comparing Moscow to its closest counterparts in America and Japan, one
cannot hope to bring forward the whole of Russia's complexity, but one can gain
a better understanding of the part of it that, one might reasonably expect, was the
most advanced along the road to modernity.
But what exactly is there to compare? Blair Ruble's approach seems to be the
following: Due to the tremendous tempo of economic and social change taking
place in the cities, their ruling elites were facing a number of tremendous challenges, namely how to manage ever-increasing cultural diversity and social tension, how to live up to rising expectations, and how to cope with the growing
demand for local services. The elites' responses and methods of coping with the
challenges each city faced constitute the main theme of Second Metropolis. Ruble
seems interested in social issues, economic development, and cultural cleavages
in Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka, only to the extent that they were addressed by
the city elites at the time.
His main analytical category is "pragmatic pluralism," understood not as a
doctrine or Weltanschauung, but rather as a practical method of addressing burning problems such as transport development in overcrowded Chicago, education
and housing in Moscow, or seaport construction and poverty in Osaka. Pragmatic pluralism presupposes the ability to balance contradictory interests, to keep far
from competing ideologies, and to accept compromises, however incongruent, for
the sake of stability, peaceful coexistence, and development. It demands outstanding political skills and the ability to adapt constantly to an ever-changing
social and cultural environment.
Ruble shows that all three cities at the time were led by exceptionally talented
individuals: mayors Carter H. Harrison of Chicago, Nikolai Alekseev of Moscow,
and Seki Hajime of Osaka. At the height of their power, each successfully addressed
some of the most pressing issues of his time, while failing to tackle others. They
and others of their sort were not particularly nice men: Alekseev was notorious for
474 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
his anti-Semitism, while the Chicago party machines gradually became synonymous with corruption. Still, their achievements in terms of identifying the pressing
problems, proposing far-sighted solutions, building coalitions in support of them,
and getting jobs done were, in many respects, impressive and lasting.
All this does not, of course, mean that city politics in turn-of-the-century
Moscow were in any sense democratic or that the Moscow merchant class did not
have a strong anti-Western and traditionalist identity. But all that being so,
Moscow still reveals "striking similarities with urbañ communities [in America
and Japan]." And having reminded us that turn-of-the-century Moscow's contribution to world culture was not less significant than those of contemporary Chicago or Osaka, Ruble persuasively suggests, citing the memoirs of Konstantin
Stan¡ slavsky-Alekseev, that flourishing culture and arts in Moscow were "due to
a great degree to young merchants who were interested not only in their business
but also in arts." Needless to say, that was exactly the milieu from which the protagonists of the pragmatic pluralist saga were coming.
The real difference of Russia, Ruble emphasizes, lay in the incompetence of
its imperial elite, in the lack of commitment on the part of the Romanovs and
their entourage to anything even rernotely resembling wholesale modernization
and Westernization of the Russian empire, in stark contrast to the vision and policies of the Japanese ruling class at the time (365-366). Whether growing polarization of the Russian polity and the rise of radical currents on the left and right
were consequences of this inadequacy of the imperial elite or unrelated phenomena, it was the triumph of totalitarian Bolshevism that effectively brought an end
to the burgeoning pluralism of Moscow city policies.
Thus, Moscow's turn-of-the-century story, as told by Ruble, supports the point
of view of those who prefer to see the Soviet communist period as a countermodernity, not as a Russian way to it. Conversely, after the downfall of communism, Moscow is returning to pursue solutions to the same kinds of problems its
elites were trying to cope with a century ago. In so doing, it has to learn lessons
abandoned at that time. 1 must confess that 1 am sympathetic to this vision.
No book can ever completely satisfy its readers, even one as good as Second
Metropolis. My concern is that the notion of pragmatic pluralism is a little overextended, as for example when the failure of Moscow city leaders to adequately
address housing problems is referrecl to as a failure of pragmatic pluralism. Why
exactly is it a failure of pragmatic pluralism and not, say, a consequence of the
scarcity of fiscal resources, or a result of the hindrances set by St. Petersburg,
which feared, as the author himself suggests, that housing programs might pander "to groups long held to be in opposition to the regime" (286)? If pragmatic
pluralism is a method of managing societal and political tensions to effectively
address pressing social problems in a pragmatic mood, then what tensions had
prevented Moscow elites from successfully dealing with this issue? If every unresolved or unaddressed issue is laid at the door of pragmatic pluralism, then what
is the heuristic value of the notion itself?
Except for this minor point, the presentation is clear and the argument is convincing. The book is extremely well written and will make very good reading for
Book Reviews 475
anyone interested in Russia's destiny in the last century, as well as in contemporary debates about it. It is vividly illustrated with a number of photographs from
the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division collection, which are
not only important documents but sometimes also real pieces of art. 1 would recommend this book to the widest possible audience.
VLADIMIR SOLONARI
Violent Entrepreneurs : The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, Vadim Volkov. Ithaca , New York: Cornell University Press , 2002. 224
pp. $42.95 hardcover.
Russian organized crime has undergone enormous changes since the collapse of
the Soviet Union. The trends and patterns that characterize its modus operandi
have been in constant flux, under pressure from both external and internal forces.
In lurid headlines and seats of power it has been hyped, vilified, and glamorizedbut rarely studied as an academic subject. Unfortunately, the lack of serious literature has somewhat obscured its true colors. Its secretive and amorphous nature
makes it difficult to investigate, especially for outside observers. Its combination
of death and honor lends itself easily to yellow journalism. Its connections to former KGB agents smacks of global conspiracies and stirs the remnants of cold war
mentality.
In Violent Entrepreneurs, Volkov attempts to correct the many myths and misperceptions about Russian organized crime by foregoing the sensational and simplistic language of murder and greed and treating the subject as an economic
agent responding to forces of supply and demand. His book, although not without flaws, is a welcome addition to a small but growing library of academic literature that examines organized crime as a real nonstate actor, on par with international blocs, NGOs, and corporations.
The thrust of Volkov's argument is that in the early 1990s, criminal groups
helped to sustain Russia's fledgling private economy by providing something that
the government could not-property rights and contract enforcement. This argument has been developed by Diego Gambetta and, notably, by Federico Varese
(who plays a conspicuously small role in Volkov's explanations), and it runs as
follows: although the post-Soviet government instituted the freedom to own private property, it did not provide the mechanisms needed to protect it-that is, a
viable set of laws, an independent judiciary, and an impartial enforcement apparatus in the form of police. Thus, in the early 1990s, Russian businesses were
operating in a state approximating anarcho-capitalism-Hobbes' state of nature
revived in the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, organized crime groups stepped
in to fill the vacuum left by the state, providing property protection and contract
enforcement to fledgling post-Soviet markets. The paradoxical corollary is that
organized crime may actually have helped to create and sustain those private markets, albeit at a high cost to the owners.
476
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
The important conclusions to draw from Volkov's book is that, first, organized
crime has primarily acted as an economic agent and, second, since 1995 organized
crime has lost its monopoly on providing protection services. Organized crime has
become only one of several types of violence-managing agencies (VMAs), as
Volkov calls them. That is hardly news for the average Russian businessman. In my
conversations with owners of small and middle-level businesses around Moscow
and St. Petersburg at the end of 2001, there was universal consensus that an enterpri se can operate without being extorted by a criminal group. What is required, however, is the presence of some sort of violence-managing agent, which Volkov classifies into four types: criminal groups, private security services, private protection
companies, and informal protective agencies associated with the state. As a result,
crime groups must now compete nol. only among themselves but also against the
other VMAs. The state, meanwhile, has also been slowly reasserting its control over
enforcement and property protection. Moreover, the largest organized crime groups
have slowly been shifting into legitirnate spheres, where the risks are smaller and
the profit potentials are greater, given the right connections. As a result, the influence of "pure" organized crime has greatly diminished since the early 1990s.
Many observers, however, are still captivated by the staggering statistics from
that period, which proclaimed that the Russian mafiya (a problematic terco for a
phenomenon neither fully Russian nor fully mafia-like) controlled 80-some percent of Russian businesses. Volkov's arguments go a long way toward clearing up
some of the confusion surrounding the issue. And yet, although he does a good
job of explaining where Russian organized crime is going, he spends too little time
explaining where it's been. To paraphrase the criminologist Anton Block: A history of Russian crime is but a reflection of Russia's own history. Many of the criminogenic mechanisms were already in place by the time the cooperative movement
began gaining momentum in the late 1980s, which is where Volkov's book picks
up. Excessive bureaucratic power and ¡Ilegal markets-conditions closely related
to the growth of organized crime-were characteristic of the Soviet Union long
before Gorbachev carne to power. In overlooking some aspects of Russia's criminal "tradition," Volkov understates an important feature of Russian organized
crime-its high degree of fusion with private enterprise and official structures. His
economic model could be improved by examining the continuity between Soviet
and post-Soviet organized crime. He rightly notes that "the overdetermination of
the Russian transition by various aspects of the legacy of `communism' conveniently rescues the policy of `shock therapy' and the underlying idea of liberal
capitalism from responsibility for some major failures in the reforms ." And yet
the lawmakers were not given a legal tabula rasa after 1991-the communist legacy played a major role in determining the choices that lawmakers faced in the early
1990s, and that legacy's influence should not be ignored. This emphasis on the
post-Soviet situation also ignores the inertia of political culture, which in some
aspects has remained unchanged wiithin the Kremlin since the Tsarist days.
But Volkov is a sociologist, not a historian, and this shows in his extensive use
of primary research via interviews with mafia figures, public officials, and private
businessmen, who not only illuminate his arguments with anecdotes, but make for
Book Reviews 477
some lively reading. Volkov also does a good job of examining the subcultures of
the 1980s that led up to the appearance of criminal gangs-sports clubs, Afghan
veterans' clubs, and ethnic groups. He provides an interesting deconstruction of
modem criminal jargon, which non-Russian speakers should find especially useful. But in explaining the minutiae of criminal linguistic nuances, Volkov never
draws the connection to the argot's athletic roots-common words such as strelka and zamochit' were originally sport terms. This may not seem very important,
but in a book that devotes so much space to philosophical meanderings about cri minal signs and semiotics, it feels like an omission.
In general, the book is an excellent starting point for a project yet to be undertaken-a thorough comparative study of organized crime within the global political econorny. For example, international organized crime has been a major beneficiary of globalization, but very few political economy texts even bother to bring
up the subject. This area is especially promising because organized crime seems
to flourish equally well in both democratic and totalitarian environments, suggesting that larger forces may be at work. An analysis of state response to organized crime across a spectrum of political regimes might yield some interesting
conclusions about the dynamics of state power and the distribution of interest
coalitions in a modern nation-state.
The Russian state, meanwhile, faces a two-fold task: allowing for the creation
of a free market and civil society and providing sufficient controls against organized crime. As in the United States, the debate is between freedom and security. Putin and his successors will need to walk a fine line while providing the country with both.
VSEVOLAD GUNITSKIY
Centerfor Defense Information
Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow s China Policy from Brezhnev to
Yeltsin , Elizabeth Wishnick . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.
320 pp. $45.00 hardcover.
Elizabeth Wishnick's Mending Fences provides a concise and clearly written history of Sino-Russian relations going back nearly forty years. The study is richly
documented with ample use of Soviet period archiva] material, the growing Soviet
memoir literature, and extensive interviews with many scholars and advisers
involved in the development of Soviet and Russian policy toward China during this
period. Wishnick has also spent a good deal of time reviewing materials and conducting interviews in the Russian Far East as well as on the Chinese side of the border, and this gives the study a great deal of insight about regional perspectives on
the relationship. That and the use of Chinese-language materials adds very useful
478
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
depth and perspective on the relationship on the Chinese side. Mending Fences is
the first major study of the Sino-Russian relationship that takes the relationship well
into the first post-Soviet decade, and t will be required reading for students, scholars, and analysts trying to better understand Russia's complicated relations in Asia.
For this the field of Russian studies is thankful, and Wishnick is to be applauded.
Although the author describes a chronology of the relationship that is full of
important and useful information, there is no overarching argument about the
relationship. Wishnick advances a framework for the study, at least the Soviet
part, by suggesting three key audiences for China policy: the international communist movement, the policy community in Moscow, and regional officials in the
Far East. But the reader does not explicitly get a sense of how the author prioritizes the importance of those policymaking groups nor how they may have interacted over the Soviet period.
We know that the Soviet Union's rigid containment strategy for China after the
1969 border incidents had the counterproductive effect of driving the PRC into the
arms of Moscow's greatest adversary-, the United States. The bungling of relations
with China stands as one of the most monumental failures of Soviet foreign policy after World War II. This is the puzzle that demands explanation. Wishnick astutely points out that the Soviet Union already enjoyed a large military advantage over
China before Brezhnev embarked on a massive military build-up in the Far East in
the latter part of the 1960s. As she points out, the Soviet leadership seemed blind
to the most elemental dynamics of the security dilemma: that the absolute increase
of party A's security comes at the expense of party B, and that party B will then
respond. Was the reason that the Soviet leadership feared Mao was a reckless and
irrational leader with little regard for human life? Was it a deep-seated "yellow
peril" mentality? Was it that the Russians tend to overestimate the capabilities of
China? Was it that the institutional and bureaucratic wiring of the Soviet Union
favored drastically militarizing the China relationship? The author points to various Soviet and Russian sources that suggest all of those factors and more, but the
narrative does give us an idea about which ones are most salient. In that regard
Mending Fences is more a work of history than social science.
Undoubtedly the normalization of Sino-Soviet relations in 1989 and the continuing rapprochement between China and Russia in the 1990s stand as an
importan. achievement for both Moscow and Beijing. Wishnick artfully lays out
the contending views of China among Russian specialists and politicians and
concisely describes the evolution of the relationship, putting it into a broader
global context for Russia. Ironically, today the reformers who supported
improving ties with China in the 1980s tend to be more wary of Russia cozying up to an authoritarian rising power that still harbors territorial claims. Conversely, communists who advocated maintaining a hard line on China in the
1980s now are more supportive of improving ties with Beijing to counter U.S.
hegemony; they view the Chinese development model as preferable for Russia
to the liberal macroeconomic approach of the 1990s.
It is true that during the 1990s as U.S.-Russian relations worsened, Moscow's
ties with Beijing improved, but in my view the author overstates the case in writ-
Book Reviews 479
ing on page 189, "As the early hopes for a new type of Russian-American relationship evolved into sober reflections on different interests, Russians began to
look toward China as their preferred strategic partner for the twenty-first century." Maybe some Russians did, but 1 think it is premature to say at this point that
"Russia" prefers China as a partner. It is an arguable point, but my interpretation
of Mr. Putin's preferences is that even before 11 September 2001 they were for
partnership with the West. Now, probably for economic reasons, Europe will be
more important for Russia, but from a strategic standpoint, 1 think that the United States would have to make some colossal foreign policy blunders, of the magnitude of those of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, to reach the point
where Moscow would ally with Beijing. China cannot give Russia what it needs
for economic and social development, and that will be, or should be, the principal concern for any Russian leadership for at least the next two decades. And for
that reason, Russia will most likely bandwagon with U.S./Western power.
With their long border, uneasy history, and developmental needs, China and
Russia are more likely to be strategic competitors than allies. But most likely
China and Russia will continue to be "partners" as both see it strongly in their
interests to maintain a constructive relationship. Wishnick seems rather equivocal about the future of the Sino-Russian relationship and its level of priority for
Moscow. She notes that some Russians have called for Russia to have a "balanced" approach to Europe and Asia-whatever that means. She also notes that
"other scholars" call for Russia to orient its interests more toward Asia and the
Middle East. Rather oddly, the author does not suggest what in my view is the
most likely scenario-that Russia will "lean to one side" with a stronger orientation toward the West, while continuing to develop and strengthen ties to the
East. In its period of historical weakness, Russia cannot afford any major power
adversaries. But for economic, cultural, social, and strategic reasons, Russia's
relations with China will remain secondary to its ties to the United States and the
West more broadly. As my colleague Dmitri Trenin noted recently in conversation, Russia and China are like two men standing back-to-back-they are near
one another, but not embracing.
ANDREW KUCHINS
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Privatizing the Police State : The Case of Poland, Maria Los and Andrzej
Zybertowicz . New York : St. Martin 's Press, 2000. 272 pp. $75.00 hardcover.
Violent Entrepreneurs : The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism , Vadim Volkov. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000.
224 pp. $17.95 paperback.
These two books examine the breakdown of the social control apparati in two former socialist states and the important consequences this has had for the future
480 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
economic, social, and political development of Russia and Poland. The two complement each other in important ways. Privatizing the Police State examines the
privatization of the state control apparatus and the impact this has had on postsocialist property relations and on the possibilities for a full break with the authoritarian system. In contrast, Violent Entrepreneurs looks at the rise of powerful
entrepreneurs of violence in Russia due to the collapse of the state power structures. Both books transcend the analysis of law enforcement and state institutions
and ask broader questions about the formations of postsocialist states and the
form that [he new capitalism would assume.
Both works are pioneering in taking topics such as gangsters (a less elegant
term for violent entrepreneurs) and the thugs of the security apparatus and constructing important theoretical arguments about state formation and transformation. They raise profound questions in accessible ways. Both use sources
gained through years of reading and careful field research in both Poland and
Russia. They affirm that insightful and powerful social science is again able to
emerge from socialist societies where suppression and self-censorship were too
long the rule.
Vadim Volkov is a social scientist who received almost all of his graduate education in the post-Soviet Union. He overlooks some of the phenomenon that have
shaped the formation of violent entrepreneurship that occurred before he became
a mature social scientist. For example, he fans to address the role of prohibition
in the rise of violent entrepreneurship. Although the role of prohibition in Russia
from 1986 to 1989 was notas dramatic as in the United States, it had a very important role in providing capital for organized crime and in developing and protecting the large-scale ¡Ilegal liquor business. It was an important source of capital
for the massive privatization that followed. Although Volkov denies that violent
entrepreneurs were active in the initial stages of privatization, that does not appear
to be true outside of St. Petersburg. The Uralmash group, the very powerful group
that controls much of the Ural-based econorny, early in the privatization process
acquired significant resources such as wine factories, mineral rights, and other
key assets in their region. His sample included only one person from the Uralmash group, in contrast to most of the others drawn from the St. Petersburg and
Moscow areas.
Violent Entrepreneurs is very good at capturing the political, social, and economic context in which the violent entrepreneurs developed. Volkov's analysis is
not one-dimensional but captures the full range of impact that the violent capitalista had in Russian society. Like Los and Zybertowicz, he sees that the privatization of the power ministries had very important consequences that surpassed
their failure to maintain order. By consolidating so much social and economic
power within their hands, they were able to be important figures in the transformation of the Russian economy from socialism to capitalism.
Privatizing the Police State was written by two Polish-educated social scientists who received their training during the socialist era. One of the authors, Maria
Los, was Torced to leave during the ^Solidarnost period but was subsequently able
to return to Poland to produce this work with a fellow Polish researcher. Polish
Book Reviews 481
sociology was much livelier in the socialist period than it was in the Soviet Union.
Therefore, this study does not rely as much on Western literature as Volkov's,
even though Los and Andrzej Zybertowicz are fully cognizant of it. They draw
much more on the rich Polish sources that elucidate the problems of privatization, the redistribution of property, and the change in power relations within the
Polish society.
Many analysts of Polish society see that country as a success story of the postsocialist transformation. Privatizing the Police State, while not totally denying
that important changes have occurred, points out that the privatization of the security apparatus and its acquisition of key properties in the banking and key financial sectors means that the transformation is not as significant as might be expected. Communist elites and power networks have been able to transform themselves
in the post-Soviet period and to maintain more power than would be suggested
by most appraisals of the postsocialist transition.
1 would recommend both of these books to serious readers who want to go
beyond much of the standard literature on postsocialist transformation. The
authors suggest that the role of thugs in the transformed economy of Poland and
Russia not only undermines the dramatic transition but will affect the long-term
economic development of the societies. As Los and Zybertowicz conclude, in the
post-cold war market the lines "between the secret services, business, and organized crime" have blurred (23l).
LOUISE SHELLEY
American University
The Collapse of the Soviet Military, William E. Odom. New Haven,
Connecticut and London : Yale University Press , 1998. 480 pp . $45.00
hardcover.
General William E. Odom is widely respected as one of the leading experts on
the Soviet military. His book Collapse of the Soviet Military represents a wellthought and admirably researched analysis of the Soviet armed forces. In it he
recognizes that the Soviet military reflected the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet society. At the same time, he does an thorough job of explaining why it largely stood on the sidelines during the fateful days of August 1991 when the Soviet
state unraveled. Odom's description of the putsch is informative, balanced, and
notably willing to state that the evidence is ambiguous as well as offer explanations for why.
The books is organized into sixteen chapters and contains useful tools for students and scholars, such as well-developed maps and charts, a list of abbreviations, a valuable chronology, biographical references, detailed footnotes and an
482
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
excellent bibliography. A major strength of Odom's analysis is that he understands that the Soviet Union was an empire and "that when the army of an empire
can no longer recruit effectively, the regime itself is in danger" (272). That situation existed as much in 1917 as it (lid more than seventy years later.
Furthermore, Odom clearly mak:es the point that the Soviet military power
couldn't "be understood apart from Soviet political power." This had several key
elements: (a) the role of official ideology was critically important for the military's own justification and claims on resources; (b) the military's role in the command economy was often not appreciated in the West (due to methodological
obstacles, it is hard to determine with accuracy the size of Soviet defense spending-there are reasonable arguments that it was anywhere in the range of 20-40
percent of Soviet GDP; [ 235-366, 429, n.l]), (c) the military was an integral part
of the Communist Party; and (d) the Soviet military's approach to nuclear
weapons and arms control was frequently misunderstood in the West (389-90).
In writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, Odom raises a critica] question: "How
could a man who could rise to become general secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union be so oblivious to the requisites for the system's stability?" Odom observes that Gorbachev "obviously failed to grasp the force of
nationalism in several of the republics. That he never held a party leadership
position in a non-Russian Republic has been widely noted to explain this blind
spot. That he never served in uniform has received less attention." He also had
less experience with the Soviet military and contact with senior officers than
his predecessors (397).
If one has to identify a gnawing weakness in this book, it is a lack of "self criticism" on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment. Although
Odom raises the question whether the Soviet military was a "paper tiger" and
insightfully describes the reasons for its rapid demise (principally, "corruption in
the senior officer ranks, brutality in the barracks, and disaffection in the junior
officer ranks"), he does not go the next step to examine whether the United States
and its NATO allies spent unnecessary billions of dollars for defense as a result
either of exaggeration of the threat or of the political dynamics of defense spending. Rather he states that "it is simply illogical to infer from the disintegration of
the Soviet military in 1989-91 that it had little or no capacity to wage effective
war in Central Europe" (291). On this point, 1 am less convinced. With the large
number of nuclear power plants spread throughout the Soviet homeland, the United States had the option of producing scores of Chernobyl-type releases of radiation, which would have made largo portions of the USSR uninhabitable. If one
accepts that view, the exercise of political control over its Warsaw Pact "allies"
seemed te) be the Soviet military's primary mission.
In 1980, the development of computer technology in the West (principally, the
United States) had a revolutionary irnpact on the East/West balance of power. The
economies of the United States and the other NATO nations were able to integrate computers into production and management in an extraordinarily successful manner. This unleashed a level of productivity that allowed for high levels of
defense spending, without placing a huge drag on the economy. At the same time,
Book Reviews 483
advances in command, control, communications, and intelligence meant that the
Soviet military's advantage in the number of its troops, tanks, and so forth was
less significant. The Soviet Union faced a major dilemma: undertake major economic and political reforms or face a less-favorable "correlation of forces" Such
reforms, however, would inevitably release nationalist forces not merely in Eastern Europe, but within the Soviet Union as well. Once such forces were released,
the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact proved irreversible. While
programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative are sometimes credited with
forcing the Soviet Union into an arms race (170), that it could neither afford nor
win, the Soviet leadership's policies in this area are better understood as symptoms rather than causes of this problem.
ETHAN BURGER
American University