Introduction

For a period of over seventy years after the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became extremely dangerous for many. In a society dominated by a giant system of internal espionage, talking about yourself could always leave perilous clues, hostages to fortune. Who could know which neighbours or friends were informers to the authorities? And to reveal that any relative or close connection had ever been in political trouble, or fought on the wrong side in the Civil War, or was descended from aristocrats or well-to-do peasants (kulaki) or even shopkeepers, could put anyone at risk of unemployment or banishment to the political prison camps in Siberia and elsewhere. In such a context, there was no chance of successful interview-based research, either by Russians or by outsiders, and understanding of what was really going on in Russia was thus generally left, in terms of politics, to 'Kremlinologists' whose prime skill was reading between the lines of Pravda and other official newspapers or, for economy and society, to a painstaking wringing-out of perspectives from published statistics, policy documents and literature. ¹