This is a personal book, but I have relied on the support of colleagues while I have been writing it. Lawrence Klein and Tim Harper, successive Chairs of the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, were quick to help me in practical ways when I needed it, and John Arnold and Gareth Austin did the same at King’s College. Christopher Clark, Marcus Colla and Geoffrey Hosking between them read all of the manuscript in one stage or another of its development, and provided extensive, acute and inspiring feedback.
This book could not have seen the light of day without Andrew Gordon of David Higham Associates, who arranged publication and provided essential comments on the manuscript, as well as Simon Winder of Penguin Books, whose editorial work on the big picture and the small detail was always brilliant. I am grateful too to David Watson for his meticulous copyediting. In New York, Wendy Strothman arranged for the publication of a US edition, and Tim Bent of Oxford University Press provided an American perspective on the manuscript. I would like to thank all the agency and publishing teams in London and New York whose ingenuity and hard work created the book. All of these people made the book much better, and its faults are the result of my stubborn refusal to follow wise advice.
More personally, I still owe the deepest of debts to my parents, which only increased during my work on this book. I am grateful too for the insights and help of my mother-in-law.
I dedicate The Russia Anxiety to two people who inhabit Russia and ‘the West’ as a single, uninterrupted space, in good times and bad: my daughter Sonia, who inspires me to start writing, and my wife Laura, who inspires me to keep going.