In her review of "The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe", political analyst Juliana Geran Pilon calls Tismăneanu's book "the best analysis of Marxist philosophy since Leszek Kołakowski's monumental trilogy "Main Currents of Marxism"." The work is Tismăneanu's study into the avatars of Marxism within the Eastern Bloc, and a contribution to both Kremlinology and Cold War studies. It proposes that the Soviet Union's policies of "Perestroika" and "Glasnost" masked an ideological crisis, and that the Bloc's regimes had reached a "post-totalitarian" stage, where repression was "more refined, less obvious, but by no means less effective". He criticizes Marxist opponents of Soviet-style communism for giving in to the ideological allure, and proposes that, although appearing reform-minded, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was, in effect, a "neo-Stalinist".