Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia, by Thane Gustafson. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2012. viii, 662 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). This book tells a fascinating story of the role of oil in Russia's economy and politics. Two central themes of the book are the crucial role of oil in Russia and the importance of the Soviet legacy for understanding Russia in general, and the oil and gas sector in particular. The story begins in the late Soviet era and takes the reader through the tumult of perestroika, the recession of the 1990s, the breakneck growth following the 1998 crisis, and the uneven economic performance of the last few years. After an introductory overview, Thane Gustafson describes, in Chapters one to three, the fight for the disintegrating pieces of the Soviet oil industry and the emergence in the early 1990s of the Russian Majors--the giant privately-owned vertically integrated oil companies (VICs). During this time, the financial entrepreneurs largely displaced the oil engineers as the main players. While the de facto role in the oil sector declined dramatically during this chaotic period, formally the continued to be important. The state's grip on the sector weakened only because the itself was in disarray. Chapter five then details the miracle of the explosive recovery of the oil sector in the early 2000s that was due not only to a dramatic rise of the world oil prices, but also to the entrepreneurship of the private owners of VICs. Ironically, this recovery also revived the power of the central government and facilitated Putin's state capitalism, which sharply curbed the influence of private investors in the oil sector. Chapters six to eight continue to analyze this period focusing on the Yukos affair, which put the richest Russian entrepreneur, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in prison and transferred the assets of the most profitable oil company in Russia to state-owned Rosneft, which then became one of the largest VICs in the world. The strengthening of the brought its de facto role in congruence with its formal, never really relinquished power. The main levers of power are taxation and regulations, which can be applied in arbitrary ways given the lack of independence of the Russian judiciary. Chapters nine and ten examine oil taxes and the regulatory system as they have functioned since the early 2000s. The central point here is that while Russia's oil taxes excel at generating revenues for the budget, they deprive the oil companies of sufficient incentives to invest in exploration and development of new fields. Another impediment to the growth of the oil sector is the limited role of foreign capital and technologies. The role of foreigners in the sector and the ambivalent attitudes of Russian oilmen and government towards them are discussed in Chapters four and eleven, with the former focusing on the first hall of the 1990s and the latter expressing a more general view. In the penultimate Chapter twelve, Gustafson argues that the Russian oil industry is facing a crisis, as the benefits of oil discoveries and other assets bequeathed to Russia by the Soviet Union run out. …