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.