The Baltic: A History of the Region and Its People by Alan PalmerReview by: Robert LegvoldForeign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2006), p. 173Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20032112 .

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Recent Books

only empire to use religion to help it rule, but Crews makes a good case that it did so longer and better than most.

The Baltic:A History ofthe Region and Its People. BY ALAN PALMER. Overlook

Press, 2006, 448 pp. $35.00. History looks strikingly different when the viewing angle is canted away from the ordinary. Writing the history of the Baltic region means bringing into a common frame the histories of Sweden, Finland, the Baltic states, Russia, Poland, Prussia, and Denmark, for the Baltic has been a battleground, a transport corridor, and a treasure linking the nine countries. From the moment Central Asian tribes drove the Sami of Finland into the Arctic North, around 500 BC, until March 2004, when Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania formally entered the North Atlantic Treaty Orga nization, drama has swirled about the Baltic Sea. Viking marauders, defenders of the faith dispatched by the early popes, and the soldiers of great empires-Danish, Lithuanian, Swedish-have swept over the region, each in their own time. Even before Peter the Great, however, the looming shadow has been Russia. Palmer explores all this in an easy, compact fashion, incorporating along the way the Baltic echo of everything from Martin Luther's Reformation to the French Revolution to Europe's great wars.

RegionalEconomic Voting: Russia; Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, andthe Czech Republic, 1990-1999. BY JOSHUA A. TUCKER.

Cambridge University Press, 2006, 444 pp. $75.oo (paper, $29.99).

Many have studied the impact of politics on economic reform in the postsocialist countries, and many have studied the

impact of economics on electoral outcomes in established democracies, particularly the United States. Far fewer have consid ered the effects of economic conditions on elections in postsocialist societies, and none so thoroughly or systematically as Tucker does in this book. In a very rigorous study of 20 presidential and parliamentary elections in five postsocialist countries,

with results compared at a regional level, he finds that voters do not, as they do in the United States, favor incumbents

when life is good and "throw the bums out" when life is bad, but rather that the "winners," those living in regions where economic conditions are better, vote for parties identified with political and eco nomic transition, and the "losers," in regions where conditions are worse, vote for parties associated with the "old (socialist) regime." This, however, is a bare-bones synopsis of a hypothesis-rich study that not only adds much to our understanding of how economics affects voting behavior in the misty, shapeless political environment of would-be postsocialist democracies, but also suggests an imaginative alternative path of inquiry in regard to established multiparty democracies.

Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism, andNeoliberalism. BY LESLIE HOLMES. Duke University Press, 2006, 440 pp. $84.95 (paper, $23.95).

For too long, corruption in the postcom munist states has been treated as a noxious but secondary problem rather than as a core obstacle to reform, a poisonous basis for public alienation, a threat to the nat ural environment, and a deadly source of contamination and violence in the wider international setting. Holmes, a veteran student of its forms in communist societies,

FORE IGN AFFAIRS September/October2006 [173]

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