shortages of reli- able information, a secretive politi- cal system, and a history and culture that present a tangle of Western and Oriental influences.
Enigma number one, writes Ox- ford's Ronald Hingley, is The Rus- sian Mind (Scribner's, 1977). Ivan the Terrible, the great 16th-century tsar, was imperious enough to order the slaughter of an elephant that failed to bow to him, yet too supersti- tious to order the arrest of a "lunatic naked monk" who wandered the countryside denouncing...