This book has taken over two years to write, but it is the product of some forty-five years of study of Communism. That has included numerous study visits to many Communist countries, beginning more than four decades ago. In the course of those visits I learned much from so many different people that it would be invidious even to begin naming those who influenced my thinking on the subject. Where remarks made to me in Communist countries have been included in the book itself, I have generally identified the person who made the statement, although I have not done so in the case of a country still under Communist rule.
Before I mention those who have been of direct help by commenting on parts of The Rise and Fall of Communism, I should like to record two important longer-standing debts, although the people concerned are no longer alive. That I have written this book at all (as well as much else on related themes) is due to Leonard Schapiro, who died a quarter of a century ago but in his day was the leading specialist in Britain on Soviet politics. He taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science where I was a student at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s. It was Schapiro who, on the strength of an essay I had written in my final year as an undergraduate, encouraged me to apply for a graduate studentship in Russian and Communist studies. My own tentative ideas about graduate work had concerned different fields entirely. That I wound up being interviewed for such an award by a committee chaired by Michael Oakeshott, and including Schapiro, set the direction of my subsequent career – and was entirely due to Schapiro’s persuasion. The other early mentor to whom I still feel indebted is Alec Nove (who was also on the LSE committee which interviewed me). I began my university teaching career in Glasgow University in 1964. Nove had moved to Scotland from the LSE the previous year to head Glasgow’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies. My appointment was in the Department of Politics, but I learned a lot in conversations and seminars with such a stimulating and perceptive colleague as Nove. Although the family roots of both Schapiro and Nove lay in the Russian Empire, they differed significantly from one another in their analyses of Soviet and Communist systems. Each of them, however, made a major contribution to that broad field, providing complementary insights.
I have also many more recent debts to record. A number of friends and colleagues read at least one chapter of this book (several chapters in some cases) and gave me their comments. In general, these led me to add to, rather than subtract from, what I had written, although I remain conscious of what I have had to leave out. In a book of this scope, not only each chapter but most of the sections within any particular chapter could have become books in themselves. The colleagues who read chapters in their areas of expertise also saved me from making a number of errors. I am enormously grateful for their help and advice. In alphabetical order, those to whom I am thus indebted are: Professor David Anderson of St Cross College, Oxford; Alan Angell, St Antony’s College, Oxford; Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC; Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former British ambassador to the Soviet Union; Dr Paul Chaisty, St Antony’s College; Professor Richard Crampton, St Edmund Hall, Oxford; Richard Davy, formerly of The Times and The Independent; Professor Rosemary Foot, St Antony’s College; Dr Nandini Gooptu, St Antony’s College; Professor Yoram Gorlizki, Manchester University; Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh of Balliol College, Oxford; Professor Charles King, Georgetown University; Dr Mark Kramer of Harvard University; Professor Rana Mitter, St Cross College, Oxford; Kenneth (Lord) Morgan, Queen’s College, Oxford; Dr Julie Newton, St Antony’s College; Dr Alex Pravda, St Antony’s College; Professor Alfred Stepan, Columbia University; Professor Arthur Stockwin, St Antony’s College; Professor William Taubman of Amherst College; and Dr Steve Tsang, St Antony’s College. On particular points I have consulted, and had very helpful responses from, Dr Roy Allison of LSE, Martin Dewhirst of Glasgow University, Dr David Johnson of St Antony’s College, Dr Tomila Lankina of De Montfort University, Leicester, Dr John Maddicott, Exeter College, Oxford, John Miller, La Trobe University, Professor Ronald Suny, University of Michigan, Dr Zachary Shore of the Naval Postgraduate School in California and Dr William Tompson of OECD. For specific items of research assistance, I am grateful to Nina Kozlova and Stéphane Reissfelder, graduate students at St Antony’s College.
The main archival sources I have used have been located in the National Security Archive in Washington DC (where Svetlana Savranskaya was a particularly helpful guide to their resources), the Hoover Institution Archive at Stanford University (where I had valuable help from Martina Podsklanova), and the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow (with access to important materials facilitated by Anatoly Chernyaev, Olga Zdravomyslova and Sergey Kuznetsov). Among the other archival documents used are some British government papers which I was able to get declassified under the UK Freedom of Information Act. Archival references, books and articles are cited in full on their first mention in the endnotes to each chapter of the book – subsequently in abbreviated form.
I am very grateful to the British Academy for the award of a Small Research Grant which greatly facilitated my research. In particular, it funded fruitful visits to both Washington and Moscow for archival research. My greatest long-term institutional debt – as may be discerned from the affiliation of quite a number of the colleagues mentioned earlier in these acknowledgements – is to St Antony’s College, Oxford. I have benefited greatly from my membership of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford, and from interaction with colleagues there. The Oxford system is such, however, that, in the humanities and social sciences, most Fellows spend the greater part of their time in their college. The fact that St Antony’s is a graduate college specializing in the social sciences and modern history has in itself been a big advantage. Even more helpful has been the fact that the college is devoted to study of problems of the real world, housing a range of regional centres, each containing first-rate specialists on different countries. The libraries I have most used have also been at St Antony’s – the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Library, which Jackie Willcox ran with great efficiency and helpfulness for a quarter of a century before being succeeded by the no less admirable Richard Ramage, and the main college library, where my thanks are due to its long-serving librarian Rosamund Campbell. The electronic resources of the University of Oxford library system have also been a boon.
I am immensely grateful to my literary agent, Felicity Bryan, for the expertise, enthusiasm and support she has provided, along with her highly efficient colleagues in the Felicity Bryan Agency in Oxford. I am greatly indebted also to George Lucas in New York for negotiating the American edition of this book. I have also had the pleasure of working with editors who have offered me much valuable advice and have been courteously patient. For this I warmly thank Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen in London, Virginia (Ginny) Smith in New York, and Tim Rostron in Toronto. I have benefited especially from Jörg’s and Ginny’s close reading of the manuscript and helpful comments.
Finally, I must thank my wife Pat, not only for carefully reading the manuscript chapter by chapter, but also for putting up with the long hours I spent working on this book. Delightful grandchildren, happily, provided much compensation. They have a special place in the dedication of this book. Perhaps one day they may even read it.