725 Ab Imperio, 4/2004 Stephen BLANK Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (London: Pluto Press, 2002). vi+303pp. ISBN: 0-74531502-X. It has never been easy to advance a credible Marxist analysis or critique of Russian politics. The overwhel-ming dominance of the state, which is an everpresent reality of Russian life, cannot easily be shoehorned into a critique that takes as its point of departure the primacy of the force of production and the relations that grow out of it. Where the state dominates the economy, it proves difficult to make a credible critique. One need only remember the kind of violent surgery Lenin had to do on Marxism in order to justify that Russia was not just a capitalist state but one that was ready for socialism. Not surprisingly, the violence done to the reality of Russia ’s mnogoukladnost’ ultimately claimed millions of sacrifices on the altar of ideological rectitude. Although Kagarlitsky is certainly not a Leninist, he is a Marxist and seeks to advance a Marxist-like critique of Russia after 1991. Moreover he openly expresses his belief that the recovery of “social being” and a genuine collectivism, along with left-wing radicalism – terms that are nowhere to be defined in the book – are essential preconditions for Russia’s freedom. Thus this critique is supposed to set the cognitive grounds for this process. Naturally, this is not the prevailing or necessarily the most insightful way to understand contemporary Russia. But Kagarlitsky is not deterred by this challenge. Given the circumstances, it is therefore somewhat surprising that much of Kagarlitsky’s critique of Yeltsin’s and to a lesser degree Putin’s Russia is in many respects not unlike those offered by numerous Western critiques. Much will sound familiar to Western writers: the debauchery of democracy, and the destruction of social equality and previously achieved levels of social security, even if imperfect. Likewise , of course, Kagarlitsky parallels much of other writers’ critiques of the oligarchs who got rich off of privatization and state contacts at the expense of the country as a whole. But even when he is treading along familiar lines Kagarlitsky frequently uses those avenues of criticism to insert original and telling points to strengthen his insights. Thus he makes the unique point that the very act of privatization and the determination of who was to get what inevitably strengthened the state over civil society. Thus the redistribution of social assets and capital had to be resubordinated again to the dictates of state power. This is the point of departure by 726 Рецензии/Reviews which the state and those who could capture state power could assume a preeminent position in Russia. Similarly he is always intent on situating his critique in Russian history. Unlike so many Western observers who should know better, Kagarlitsky asserts that this history did not begin with Gorbachev or even with Lenin and Stalin and observes ironically that Russia today is not unlike Russia under Nicholas II, a peripheral state within the capitalist world system . Similarly he is acutely aware of the historical Russian tendency by which Western and democratic forms are transplanted into facades for autocracy in Russia. These kinds of insights abound throughout the book alongside calls for a left-wing collective movement and lend it considerable power. Thus Kagarlitsky is able to diagnose many of the pathologies afflicting contemporary Russia from a standpoint that is more informed than that of many other observers who are certainly cognizant of the same phenomena but lack an explanatory framework within which to set their observations . Not surprisingly, Kagarlitsky ’s intellectual honesty also obliges him to focus on the role of the state because the circumstances surrounding its birth precluded the emergence of a genuine bourgeoisie, capitalist class, or worse, democracy . This autocracy grows out of the circumstances of privatization, of Yeltsin’s single-minded obsession with hanging onto his power, and of the dependence of the new oligarchical class on favors from above and opportunities for exploitation of the old state economy. As one would expect in a neoMarxist analysis, Kagarlitsky moves from his focus on the state to an assessment of the media and intelligentsia . While...