The rise of Russia's regions became one of the big stories that followed the collapse of Soviet communism. After decades of submission in a highly centralized and authoritarian system, resurgent regions emerged as autonomous actors, threatening the territorial integrity and political stability of the newly independent Russian state. With the notable exception of Chechnya, Russia's regions eventually were reintegrated with the center, but on the basis of an asymmetrical federal system. Elizabeth Pascal's book examines the process that led to this uneven territorial distribution of power in post-Soviet Russia.

Pascal's analytical focus is the use of bilateral negotiations to redefine the rights and responsibilities between the center and individual regions. More specifically, she argues that the asymmetry in the Russian federation was determined by the variant economic and political resources that regional leaders brought to bear in the bilateral negotiation process. To demonstrate the argument, the study compares three regions that ended up in very different positions concerning economic rights in the new federation. The time period is confined to the Yeltsin presidency. In a conclusion, Pascal places the Russian experience in a comparative perspective, bringing in Spain and Canada as other examples of asymmetrical federal systems.

The real strength of the book is the rich detail found in the three regional case studies—Samara, Bryansk, and Vologda. These cases are constructed from primary sources, based largely on interviews with local officials. While the source base is a noteworthy contribution of the book, the author might have been a bit more critical in its use. The cases provide an interesting insiders' account and bottom-up perspective on the process that led to asymmetrical federalism. They show why some regions were more interested in negotiating over “pocketbook” issues—maintaining access to federal subsidies—rather than in “rulebook” issues—gaining autonomy over the regional economy.

Samara, located along the Middle Volga region, benefited from a diversified and well-developed regional economy. Samara was ruled by a powerful and tactful governor in cooperation with a unified regional elite. Regional politicians were able to concentrate their political capital on bilateral negotiations. As a result, Samara managed to wrest significant economic rights from the center. Bryansk, located in the poor western region near the Belarussian and Ukrainian borders, suffered economically from its dependence on military industry and agriculture. The Bryansk political elite were marred by official corruption, internal division, and leadership turnover. With such obstacles, Bryansk remained a recipient of federal handouts and under the tight fiscal control of the center. Vologda, located north of Moscow in the central industrial region, fits in between these two cases in terms of economic potential and political clout. Not surprisingly, Vologda's negotiations with the center led to an outcome of shared fiscal responsibilities and rights.

Through its empirical findings, the book provides a revealing glimpse into the practice of asymmetrical federalism in Russia. While the description of each case is well done, the study is weak in demonstrating the larger analytical claims. The main question concerning the relationship between the bilateral approach to center–regional relations and the rise of asymmetric federal institutions is left unanswered. In the setup to the study, Pascal argues that Russia's asymmetrical federalism was the result of three influences: preexisting institutions, policy choices, and the intersection of national and subnational interests (p. 3). But the study does not develop this scheme in a systematic and comparative way. Related to this, the study is hindered by a tendency to introduce analytical concepts—path dependency, short-time horizons, presidential vertical, Rikerian bargain (pp. 11, 67, 182)—but not explicitly to follow up on them. Instead, they appear almost as afterthoughts and are not coherently integrated into the analysis. Meanwhile, in the case study chapters, the analysis implicitly suggests that regional economic endowments and political skills are the main determining factors in redefining relations with the center.

The problems with the analysis are compounded by style. The research findings are presented in a narrative style, with a compilation of anecdotes and quotations. There certainly is nothing wrong with this approach, except that there is little effort to place the particular findings into a comparative analytical context. The book would have benefited from a tight conceptual scheme that explicitly and consistently highlighted the key distinctions among the cases and elaborated on their larger implications. As it is, the reader can be frustrated by overly long paragraphs, tedious repetition, and undeveloped analytical statements. The limitations of this approach are exposed in the conclusion, in which the some of the author's key assumptions about bilateralism and asymmetrical federalism seem to have been undermined by the Putin presidency.

The book fits in well with recent scholarship on the reconfiguration of center–regional relations in post-Soviet Russia. With 89 constituent regions to cover in in-depth case studies, Defining Russian Federalism provides a needed and valued contribution to scholars. The book will have a more limited appeal to comparative studies of federal systems.