As Chapter 1 noted, this book is devoted to explaining the weak political and administrative capacities of Russian central state institutions in the periphery following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

A thorough analysis of this question, however, requires an examination of the institutional mechanisms by which the Soviet state extended its authority across the periphery. This too begs the question as to whether or not Soviet central institutions were all that successful in governing disparate territories. This is particularly relevant too in light of Putin's turn toward a more centralized, authoritarian rule of Russia's provinces in 2004, discussed in the concluding chapter.

In 1968, Samuel Huntington wrote admiringly that

But if the communist regime of the Soviet Union was so capable of governing, how and why did the system collapse? How did the nature of its collapse constrain the reform options for post-Soviet institutional designers? In what ways did these constraints and resulting decisions render Russian central state institutions deficient in penetrating provincial politics? This chapter responds to these fundamental questions.

One increasingly popular line of argument in the post-Sovietological literature puts the blame on Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president, and his reform team of “neo-liberal shock therapists” as well as their foreign economic advisors.