This book is the study of governors and the governed, from 1801 until the liquidation of the Soviet state. In charting the rocky course of that relationship, it devotes considerable attention to the two occasions when rebellion did succeed, placing them firmly in the context of 200 years of Russian history.

This book asks three fundamental questions about the socialist experiment in twentieth-century Russia: How did Marxist ideas come to be implemented in Russia, a country entirely unsuited to them? Why did the experiment lead to such suffering and upheaval and prove so fruitless? And why did the attempt to return to a proper Marxism/Leninism bring about the rapid collapse of the experiment. In its answers, this book pays special attention to the shadow cast by Lenin throughout the entire Soviet era.