The rise of new isolationism, ill-informed, simplistic and militant, calls for an urgent effort to open windows into Russia aiming at a more realistic understanding of Russian society, especially so by the political, economic and media-producing elites of the West. It should introduce real Russia, warts and all, with no cosmetics but within a balanced picture of its life, ways of survival, collective thought, dynamics and problem resolutions. In particular, it must go behind the daily scandals and the thin layer of “oligarchic” speculators and political hacks, to Russian society at large, especially so to the 90% of the population outside Moscow. Corrupt officials, impudent thieves and vicious generals come together with remarkable schools run by selfless teachers, quite a number of effective managers who pull their enterprises out of general morass, the currently blossoming of NGOs of humanitarian type, the brilliant and ever full theatres the numbers of which doubled within the last few years. In badly hit regions object poverty goes together with remarkable survival abilities of family networks within informal economies and pockets of group solidarity on a major scale. And so on.

...For a time Chayanov was high fashion but even when the swing of academic attention moved to new names and "fads" many of his book's questions, insights, and even terms (e.g., "self-exploitation") have remained as fundamental points of reference of the contemporary social sciences, economic and noneconomic. For that reason, the book made history also in the sense of acquiring a life of its own—an influence which shapes perception, focuses attention, defines plausibilities and modes of analysis, offers symbols, and often underlies political programs, national as well as international.