Russia and Development: Capitalism, Civil Society and the State by Charles Buxton (Zed Books, £24.99)

In this wide-ranging book, Charles Buxton brings a fresh eye to the historical analysis of Russian development during the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Rather than take a simplistic pro- or anti-Soviet position, he attempts to place more recent developments in Russia and Central Asia in a historical context by examining the late tsarist and Bolshevik periods and comparing these to developments since perestroika and the Soviet collapse.

It is not strictly speaking a Marxist analysis. But it does allow for the complex factors of local, national, class and international forces at work —which are impacting on Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union.

Buxton, a Russian speaker and development worker who first worked for the Novosti press agency in the late 70s, sheds some light on how the state shut down or “nationalised” civil society in the 1920s and early 1930s, and how independent civil organisations re-emerged 60 years later as Soviet rule was dismantled. He offers a balanced and sympathetic survey of the positive legacy of the Soviet system but also its weaknesses — in particular, the absence of independent social bodies that might have defended people’s interests in the wake of the neoliberal shock treatment of the 1990s.

The author finds that many non-government organisations have put down roots and, despite the new cold war we seem to be entering, the picture of a neo-totalitarian regime cracking down on all civil society is not one he finds in the sectors he knows well, through his work for VSO and the Intrac development agency. International aid organisations, he suggests, have made some positive contributions. Yet Buxton admits that social indicators in the post-Soviet period went into dramatic reverse until the advent of Vladimir Putin.

Having spent considerable time working in central Asia, Buxton’s chapters on Kyrgystan and Tajikistan are enlightening. Using Soviet-era sources, he describes the gradualist approach of the Bolsheviks to modernisation in the remote eastern parts of the new multinational state, a policy that later changed.It’s sobering to discover that Kyrgystan suffered just as severely as Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the great famine that followed collectivisation in the early 1930s, with one in six people dying of hunger in one region. It may come as a surprise to some to learn that in the post-Soviet era Uzbekistan, by refusing to dismantle the social structure that protected people in the past, has avoided the social catastrophe that befell states like Kyrgystan, which have embraced the capitalist model.

In later chapters on new social movements in Russia, Buxton gives a sense of the grassroots resistance to privatisation and injustice by trade unions, pensioners, tenants and environmental activists — not something you’ll hear about on the BBC. He details new Russian left critiques of the kind of capitalism being enabled by the state under Putin, who’s often presented as a two-dimensional bully in Western media.

Yet there’s the sense of popular resistance emerging in different parts of the former Soviet Union, which is opposing the national capitalist project promoted by the Russian leader.