Georgi Derluguian writes that Cohen’s exposition of the alternatives facing Gorbachev as reformer misses key elements that would give his analysis a firm disciplinary foundation: the social mechanisms involved in formulating and spreading competing discourses, the structural coalescence of potentially contentious groups and their actual mobilizing, the institutionalization of political gains, elite and oppositional brokerage, geopolitical configuration, and shifts in economic flows. He calls for a more rigorous analysis that would incorporate these elements, and he illustrates his method by sketching a number of key nodal points in the history of the USSR that would allow scholars to examine counterfactual, alternative pasts.