Revolution and modernization are two main issues of the book. The author argues that in Modernism the work of art was conceived as a miniature of the world to come; thus, art was meant to make projects, not master-pieces. He analyzes the genre of the manifesto as a special rhetorical device of modernist discourse and shows how projects of biological and social engineering elaborate a vision of a future human type apt to exist under unprecedented conditions.

Red Square, Black Square traces the process of totalitarian reduction of the modernist impulse into a rigid party doctrine. It follows the turbulent development of Russian Modernism through its categorical arrest under the official doctrine of "socialist realism." Moscow's Red Square is examined as a primal communist space that manifests the symbolism of power.

Viewing communism as an aesthetically, not economically, motivated society, the book enacts "political aesthetics" as a discipline that provides the fundamental tool for an adequate and thorough understanding of communism. Todorov concludes by discussing the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe as a post-communist condition, and the new mission of the intellectuals.