Depending on how you look at it, the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled either the tragic failure of Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist agenda or the welcome collapse of the evil empire. A second dividing line concerns what happened next. . . .

Daniel Treisman tries to be fair—perhaps too fair—as he assesses such matters in "The Return: Russia's Journey From Gorbachev to Medvedev," but they are too big for such fence-sitting. He is at his best on less-fraught subjects—the chapter on the economic history of modern Russia should be required reading. . . .

Readers may be less pleased by Mr. Treisman's occasional ventures into passing judgment. For instance, he sympathizes with Mr. Gorbachev's professed attempts to make the Soviet Union into a humane and tolerant multinational state, and he mourns their failure. Yet he skates over the central feature of the Soviet Union: It was a totalitarian empire grounded on lies and the mass murder of millions. . . .

Another problem is that the author's lens is not just Russia-focused but Kremlin-centered. His use of the phrase "radical nationalists" to describe the freedom-fighters of captive nations such as Georgia and the Baltic states echoes the Moscow line. These rebels' efforts to undermine Soviet rule and anchor their reborn countries in the West deserve praise, not the disdain that Mr. Treisman implies. . . .

Mr. Treisman is prey to the neurotic but common misconception of seeing the West's failures as excuses for Russian misrule. Western policies in Iraq, Kosovo or Ukraine may well have been botched or hypocritical, as he suggests. But such mistakes are subject to independent scrutiny and the verdict of voters in real elections, unlike the Russia of Messrs. Putin and Medvedev.