Professor Gustafson works on domestic politics and policymaking of the former Soviet Union. Along with a number of articles, chapters and RAND corporation monographs, he has published Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water; Crisis Amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev; Soldiers and the Soviet State (co-edited with Timothy Colton); and Russia 2010 (with Daniel Yergin).