The enormously complex changes triggered by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe were nowhere more ambiguous than in the heartland of the Soviet bloc, Russia itself. Here the population was divided on all the most fundamental questions of post-communist transition: economic reforms, the Communist Party, the borders of the state, even the definition of the Russian "nation" itself. This book stands back from the turbulent post-Soviet era and inquires into the nature of the �Second Russian Revolution�. It argues that Russia deserves our attention now as much as ever, because it raises so many of the big questions about how societies operate in the modern world.