His most notable work is "Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War", an intellectual history of the rise to power of Gorbachev and his 'New Thinking' in the USSR. The book first charts the origins and nature of "Old Thinking," which persisted in the traditional Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the USSR, and he goes on to chart the changes in society and of intellectual class in the history of the USSR under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev.