Sabrina P. Ramet is professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She is the author of six other books, among them Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe (1997) and Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (1998). She has also edited a dozen books, mostly about Eastern Europe and Russia.