The authors believe that most Western (particularly American) Sovietologists have missed the boat in their facile interpretations of Gorbachev's "new thinking" on international relations, because they do not relate it to the Marxist ideology that gives it meaning. They devote the book to showing what the connection is and how the Soviet leader and his advisers, far from accommodating to Western norms, have in mind a new "counter-hegemonic" international order based on Marxism-but not on Leninism-Stalinism. The argument is stimulating. It also stretches the imagination.