SEER, Vol. 86,No. i,January 2008 Review Article Gramsci inMoscow GONZALO POZO-MARTIN Worth, Owen. Hegemony, InternationalPolitical Economy and Post-Communist Russia. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005. vii + 183 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?55.00: $99.95. Marxism is rarely among the modes of analysis favoured by area specialists. This is hardly surprising. Area studies is a scholarly effort devoted to the analysis of the politics, economics or culture of particu lar social configurations arbitrarily organized in space. Historical materialism, on the other hand, is a social theory concerned with totalities, interested in the interplay of structures and agency, suspicious of bare empiricism or methodological pluralism. Area specialists seek a deep, detailed knowledge of their spatialized objects of inquiry and, in effect, aim at showing why and how a given territory is specific. Marxists, on their part, tend to concentrate on generalities, 'social laws' unfolding in uneven and combined fashion, mediated by the historical and spatial specificities they sustain. This methodological contrast between area studies and historical materialism appears at its sharpest, perhaps, in the study of post-Soviet Russia, for the added reason that, in this field,Marxism iswidely seen as part of the reality to be analysed (not, therefore, as a way of analysing it).Marxism is largely identified with the political ideology that dreamt up the Soviet nightmare and, therefore, it has been often discarded from the analysis of contempo rary Russia: historical materialism has been placed, as itwere, on the other end of themicroscope. Area studies' troubled marriage to broader social theories is also apparent in the analysis ofRussia's place in international relations and of its domestic politics. Work on Moscow's international standing is usually conducted from one of two generally exclusive standpoints: international or national. The international, or outside perspective, tends to concentrate on issues like EU or NATO enlargement vis-?-vis the Kremlin, or on the risks and implications of partnerships or stand-offs between the Russian Federation and other international actors ? in other words, mostly on problems of security and policy. Alternatively, research might be grounded on a national, or 'inside', Gonzalo Pozo-Martin is a PhD student at theUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. ii6 GRAMSCI IN MOSCOW perspective, and analyse the domestic sources of Russia's geopolitical outlook (its roots increasingly explained with reference to processes of discursive formation as much as to Russia's political and economic specificities).1 This division of labour, however, has an important shortcoming. It assumes that a clean cut can be operated between international and national politics, and tends to overlook a number of fundamental ways in which the world economy and international relations will exert its own set of determinants on Russia's foreign and national politics. In the study of Russian politics, more generally, very few authors have managed to bind a deep understanding of the area's specificities with an examination of the country's place in the interna tional political economy and interstate system. Analyses of this field are increasingly made up of different blends of narrative description cum statistical measurement, as though Russia were a phenomenon unto itself, determined mainly by its own history and political traditions, untouched in any relevant way by the constitutive forces of the world economy. Thus, most monographic studies ofRussian politics on offer are all usually planned in a similar way. Through them, students learn to think about today's Russia through a relatively fixed succession of compartmentalized subfields: first, historical legacies, then issues of leadership, political institutions, parties, regional politics, and so forth, until we finally get to a chapter on foreign policy (generally towards the end of the volume). As with a restaurant menu, students of Russian politics are no more invited to question this analytical design than to doubt that starters are followed by main courses, and main courses followed by desserts. If all this is true, then whenever area specialists frame their enquiries locally they will tend to lose sight of two crucial kinds of inputs: international capitalism and international relations. A much closer engagement with social and international theory is required ifwe are fully to understand and factor in these effects. And it...