Preface

Summary

This book probably got started in Moscow some eight years ago. Its immediate occasion was yet another bout of insomnia, induced this time not by one of the usual offenders - heartaches, backaches and financial woes - but by the insistence of a single nagging question which I found myself helpless to avoid: How does this system work? Moments on the street, in the office, in the cafeteria taught me what I had learned and not learned through years in the classroom and the library, namely, that, although I might know a number of things about the Soviet Union, when it came to its basic ‘laws of motion’ I was drawing a blank. I simply had not developed concepts that could make sense of the confusing variety of experiences that I was undergoing. I lacked a method that was adequate to the task.

While this book is by no means an attempt to address in full the fundamentals of the Soviet order, it does have a few ambitions along these lines. Accordingly, one of its aims is to take method seriously. By ‘method’ I have in mind no more than a particular way of looking at the world that specifies ex ante how we might compose what would otherwise be a welter of discordant perceptions into a comprehensible system of ideas and facts. By this measure, of course, we are always relying on method, whether we are reading a newspaper or writing a book on Soviet elites. My point is simply to acknowledge this reliance and, in so doing, to take it, again, seriously.