Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.

• Author: Maltsev, Yuri
• Position: Book review

Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia

By Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Pp. 167. $80.00 cloth.

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss is associate director for research and senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, she was on the faculty at Princeton University and served as a visiting professor at Columbia and McGill universities. She has held fellowships at Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She is the author of many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia and of the book Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). She is also a coeditor of After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Stoner-Weiss states that Resisting the State is a product of nine years of surveys of Russian policymakers in seventy-two of the eighty-nine Russian regions and draws on her previous work on Russian regional politics and policies.

At the outset, she marks the territory she will defend: "the arguments and evidence presented here run counter to the arguments of those who would maintain that the greatest threat to the growth of competitive markets in federal states is an unrestrained central state" (pp. 4-5). In contrast, she identifies "the Russian state's inability to extend its authority across the vast Eurasian landmass as the primary problem of post-communist governance" (p. 1). Echoing Vladimir Putin and his Committee for State Security/Federal Security Service (KGB/FSB) cronies in the provinces, Stoner-Weiss asserts that the solution to Russia's economic and political problems lies in the central government's will and ability to exercise tight controls over the regions on key policy issues. She writes that "rather than become more able to ensure policy implementation, the Russian state became weaker ... as it continued to be hijacked for personal gain" (p. 146). Regions continue to defy the central government (that is, Putin's dictatorship), and their defiance "depends heavily on local business leaders who made off literally as bandits during the collapse of the Soviet state." For some reason unexplained in the book, Stoner-Weiss believes that Putin's moves to impose tight controls will not work owing to sabotage of them at the local level. In her view, Putin failed to break the business-government nexus at the regional level. "Just as Yeltsin built a weak electoral democracy on the top of a weak central state, Putin in turn has attempted to build authoritarianism without central state authority" (p. 155).

Stoner-Weiss is not interested in what has happened to reform and economic transition from the centrally planned to the market economy, but rather in why the Russian central government has been unable to control its...