IN ITS PRESENT FORM, THE OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK WAS CONCEIVED IN 2009, when I was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, on leave from the University of Chicago, in 2009. The book was largely researched in Moscow and Chicago, but written after I moved to Australia in 2012. The writing took place in my office at the University of Sydney, far from the natural terrain of Sovietologists. I am grateful to Graeme Gill, who read the whole manuscript; to Ann Curthoys and Kay Dreyfus, who read chapters; and to the University of Sydney, which provided a welcoming and congenial new home. In thinking how to approach the project, I profited from discussions with Bernard Wasserstein and Mark McKenna. Andrea Graziosi, Arch Getty, Stephen F. Cohen, Michael David-Fox, Oleg Khlevniuk, John Besemeres, Yoram Gorlizki, Mark Edele, Stephen Fortescue, and Stephen Wheatcroft were kind enough to answer queries. Leonid Weintraub copied some archival documents for me in Moscow, and June Farris, Slavic librarian at the University of Chicago, provided unstinting support by email.
I benefited greatly from my collaboration with Stephen Wheatcroft on a Discovery Project grant on Stalinism funded by the the Australian Research Council. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Katja Heath, whose photo-researching skills were invaluable, as well as to Brigitta van Rheinberg, Quinn Fusting, and the fine editorial team at Princeton University Press, and Sally Heath at Melbourne University Press.
The Research Group of the History Department of the University of Sydney made helpful comments on chapter 1.I had useful feedback from papers on the project delivered at Carleton College, Kenyon College, and the University of Madison at Wisconsin (2010); the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Melbourne (2011); the University of California at Berkeley (2012); the University of New South Wales and Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan (2013); and the Europe Centre, Australian National University (2014). Particularly important during the final revision of the manuscript in autumn 2014 were the comments and suggestions on my presentation of conclusions at the University of Bremen, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Manchester, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a joint meeting of the Deutsches Historisches Institut and Centre Franco-Russe (with Oleg Khlevniuk as commentator) in Moscow.
The middle section of chapter 3 is a revised version of “The Boss and His Team: Stalin and the Inner Circle, 1925–1933,” published in Stephen Fortescue, ed., Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), a Festschrift for T. H. Rigby.
I owe a large general debt to the good friends and colleagues who have worked longer and dug deeper than I on Soviet political history—among them, Oleg Khlevniuk, Yoram Gorlizki, Arch Getty, Jörg Baberowski, and Bill Taubman—whose pioneering works served both as inspiration and reference.
Igor Alexandrovich Sats first sparked my interest in the human aspect of Stalin’s team back in the 1960s, while in the 1970s Jerry Hough encouraged me (at the time, vainly) to use the knowledge I had acquired from Sats to write a political history. I would like to end with a respectful acknowledgment of political scientists of a senior generation who were my mentors long ago, and in some cases later became friends: E. H. Carr, Leonard Schapiro, Robert C. Tucker, Robert W. (Bill) Daniels, and T. H. (Harry) Rigby. I think the last two would have liked this book—and perhaps Carr as well, despite the sternness with which, in his History of Soviet Russia, he concealed his own keen interest in human drama and personality.