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.

The first virtue of the book is simply its impressive combination of broad scope with remarkable concision. Owning Russia provides what is probably the most comprehensive account of the evolution of property relations in Russia available in English, and it does so in well under three hundred pages. That alone is likely to make it essential reading for students of Russia's economic transformation for a long time to come, particularly as it is written in a lucid and engaging style. Of particular value in this regard is Chapter 3, which tells the story of the property reforms of the Gorbachev era, beginning with the first timid steps in the mid-1980s and culminating in the onset of large-scale “spontaneous privatization” as the Soviet era drew to a close. This story is both fascinating and important for an understanding of what follows, and it has received too little attention since 1992, having been overshadowed by the turmoil of the post-Soviet period.

However, the book offers more than just a “history of Russian privatization”. While he avoids forcing his history into a rigid theoretical framework, Barnes knows the literature on the political economy of transition well and draws deeply on it. His principal theoretical concern is to break with the habit of reading Russia's postcommunist history through the prisms of “democratization” and/or “transition,” which imply that the end point of the transformation under way since 1985 is clear and well known, and which exhibit a tendency to interpret the conflicts of the present in terms of some anticipated future. In analyses of property relations, this leads to accounts that pit “reformers” against “conservatives” and that treat privatization as ipso facto evidence of progress. Such accounts often impute to the property-settlement process an order that was not necessarily there, and they tend either to ignore postprivatization control contests or to view them simply as the pathological aftereffects of flawed privatization processes. In rejecting this approach, Barnes focuses not on the future but on the present and past—on the stakes being contested and on the agents who are contesting them, their motives, and the resources at their disposal. As Barnes puts it, “today's conflicts produce tomorrow's resolutions, not the other way round” (p. 227).

A second major strength of the book is the inclusion of agriculture in the analysis. The study of post–Soviet Russia's agrarian transformation has largely been isolated from the study of the industrial and financial sectors. The study of the rural transition has also been heavily focused on a narrow range of issues, such as the emergence (or not) of private farming on a substantial scale. Yet as Barnes shows, the contrast between the privatization of factories and farms is instructive: The implications of privatization policies for control over real assets were different in the two sectors and prompted farm directors to resist precisely the forms of privatization their industrial colleagues pursued. Moreover, the author shows that the struggle for assets in the agrarian sector makes sense only when it looks not only at the farm sector but also at the entire agricultural production chain, including the sectors that produce the farms' inputs, as well as the “downstream” food-processing industry.

The book's treatment of other sectors, while solid and well informed, lacks the depth of understanding of sectoral issues that it displays with respect to agriculture. For the most part, it would be hard to quibble with the conclusions reached in the analysis of industrial property contests, but more attention to the sectoral peculiarities would have enriched the analysis of sectors like aluminum (pp. 136 ff.), where Barnes traces but does not fully explain the success of outsiders in establishing strong positions in some enterprises. A part of the explanation, at least, lies in the structure of the industry: Russia's major aluminum smelters were privatized as just that—individual smelters. Lacking stable sources of raw materials or marketing arms of their own, they soon fell under the influence of trading companies able to provide them with both under “tolling schemes.” The traders then sought to secure control over the smelters themselves.

Owning Russia ends with an analysis of developments since 2003 and a look at the future. The former is persuasive and offers a clear, nuanced account of President Vladimir Putin's understanding of the relationship between politics and property—an account that avoids both underplaying the significance of recent policy shifts and painting them in apocalyptic “back to the future” terms. However, the look ahead is less convincing. It is not difficult at the end of a work such as this to adduce many reasons why Russia remains a long way from a stable property settlement—why “the Russian struggle for property moves from phase to phase rather than to a stable system of regularized capitalist competition” (p. 230). Yet this assessment may underestimate the progress Russia has already made—at an uneven pace, and with many zigs and zags, to be sure—in precisely that direction.