The Russian troika hurtles through these pages. The Spectre, modernity's belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice's looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia's inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West's unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West's own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.

Here modern Europe is depicted as a West-East cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West's challenged in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most of this century. As the oldWest-East gradient reappears a genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that as for so long tantalized -- and eluded -- Western eyes.