Legacies of Repression in Egypt and Tunisia: Authoritarianism, Political Mobilization, and Founding Elections. By Alanna C. Torres-Van Antwerp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 255p. $120.00 cloth.

issues are associated with the Soviet legacy or other factors. Ukraine’s ranking in the Transparency International Index places it in the neighborhood with Egypt, Nepal, and Sierra Leone. Herron’s excellent discussion of corruption in the political system would have been stronger if there was more mention of the economic dimension of this. He notes in chapter 4, “Ukraine’s business sector is a critical actor in electoral politics” (p. 98) and at the root of much of the corruption. The story of how the Communist Party elite blended with the newly emerging corporate elites who came to dominate the political process could have received more attention. Furthermore, the oligarchs are barely present in the discussion, despite not only their media ownership but also their active role in corrupting the political process. Rinat Akhmetov, who bankrolled the Regions Party is mentioned only once (p. 98) and his associate Yury Boyko twice (pp. 143, 164–67); Ihor Kolomoisky, who was associated with Volodymyr Zelensky appears only three times (pp. 3, 98, 100); Victor Pinchuk, former President Kuchma’s son-in-law, has only two mentions; while Dmytro Firtash, Serhiy Lyovochkin, and Victor Medvechuk do not appear at all. The use of Yanukovych’s “Black Ledger” (p. 110) serves as a great illustration of corrupt practices but perhaps not an example of “how campaign financing is poorly regulated in Ukraine.” The 800-page handwritten book kept track of illicit payments from 2007 to 2012, including those made to US lobbyist Paul Manafort. Also, like many political scientists, Herron doesn’t really include a discussion of the role of political communication in his analysis, or as John Downing once put it, he treats political actors as mute chess pieces moving around on a large political chessboard (Internationalizing Media Theory: Transition, Power, Culture. Reflections on Russia, Poland and Hungary 1980–95, 1996). This is all the more surprising given how much attention is devoted to elections, where media plays a key role, and that the oligarchs own most of the media in the country (Marta Dyczok and Diana Dutsyk, “Ukraine’s Media: A Field Where Power is Contested,” in Matthew Rojansky, Georgiy Kasianov, and Mykhailo Minakov, ed., From ‘the Ukraine’ to Ukraine: History of Contemporary Ukraine (1991–2020), 2021). Herron’s main argument that corruption is the norm in Ukrainian politics is a solid one, however the framing of it suggests a static situation. Another way of framing it would have been to portray it as a power struggle between those who sought to continue Soviet-era systemic corruption, transforming it into modern formats in response to changing circumstances, and those who have sought to eradicate it, albeit with limited success to date. This comes through the discussion about civil society and incumbent President Zelensky’s new initiative to fight corruption prior to the Russian invasion that changed everything in Ukraine but is implicit rather than explicit. Overall, this highly readable book makes a contribution to our understanding of both contemporary Ukraine and how corruption works and is likely to find its way onto many syllabi on both topics.