Imagine the horror of a paleontologist confronted by a live dinosaur—grinning amicably and wagging its tail as a token of good intentions. In the era before the advent of glasnost and perestroika, people studying and writing about the Soviet Union practiced a paleontology of sorts. An odd bone thrown over the Iron Curtain or a chunk of petrified entrails surreptitiously pushed under it were analyzed meticulously and served as the basis for reconstructing the entire body of the beast. Now these same people find themselves inside a paleontologist’s nightmare, for the Soviet Union has arrived at our door—thanks to glasnost, an increased access to decision-makers in Moscow, and a veritable invasion of Soviet visitors, among them scholars, policy advisers, intellectuals, generals, ministers, and, of course, the dissidents whom we must now rechristen, to avoid anachronism, members of the opposition. Could this still be the old country?

True, the Soviet Union retains much of what has defined it for decades; yet the organs and various parts of this Hobbesian animal have turned out to be distributed differently from what was once imagined, and the whole thing does not appear as well put together as the old paleontological renditions seemed to suggest. Indeed, this commonwealth—uniting as it does a Northern European Estonia ripe for democracy and autonomy and an Oriental Uzbekistan choking on the Soviet imperial legacy—so much resembles a fanciful animal from a medieval bestiary that another question arises: are we dealing here with one beast or a multitude