Contents:The discipline and I -- pt. 1. The fate of ideas in history -- Alexander Herzen and Isaiah Berlin on Russia's elusive counter-Enlightenment -- Russian and Western European roots of Soviet totalitarianism -- Traditions, old and new : patterns of protest and dissent in modern Russia -- pt. 2. Social groups in comparative perspective -- On intellectuals and intellectual traditions in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Russia -- The nobility in Russia and Western Europe : contrasts and similarities -- Comparing Russian serfdom and American slavery -- Agrarian crisis, urbanization, and the Russian peasants at the end of the old regime, 1880s-1920s -- pt. 3. Approaches to the history of Russia -- Re-inventing the Enlightenment : Western images and Eastern realities in the eighteenth century -- Political murder in Russian culture : comparisons and counterfactuals -- Current events and the representation of the past : issues in Russian historical writing -- Afterword.