Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms and Power

Extract

Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms and Power. By Andrew Barnes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 288p. $35.00 cloth.

Andrew Barnes has produced an admirably complex book. While providing a lucid, readable, and persuasive analysis of the evolution of property relations in Russia during the 20 years from 1985, he avoids imposing artificially tidy theoretical schemes on the very messy processes he describes. Instead, he explores the full range of actors, institutions, strategies, and exogenous events that have shaped the struggle for property in Russia since the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. This is above all a work of history—a theoretically informed history, but history nonetheless—and it is therefore a work in which contingency is sometimes important, and one in which the question of which actors shaped which outcome, and why, is always an empirical one—never something determined by an ex ante assumption. In place of a spare, highly theoretical explanation of this or that aspect of Russian privatization, Barnes offers a complex but nevertheless comprehensible account of how contests for control of real assets have evolved hitherto and where they may be headed in the future.