You wrote a book about Stalinism's C Level Contact List pinnacle of power. I am referring to The Stalin Team , which you yourself defined as " a kind of ethnography of the Politburo " . Why did you decide, after working everyday life, to develop a C Level Contact List study on the structure of power in Stalinism? Again there are a number of reasons, but perhaps I could just mention the main one: I like to do things I haven't done before and I don't like to be pigeonholed. I had already gone from being a cultural historian – or, rather, a historian of cC Level Contact List ultural institutions – to working in the field of social history. I mean, I hadn't stayed in one field. But on this specific question, I had always known something about the Politburo in the 1920s because, for decades, I had cultivated a close friendship with Igor Sats, Lunacharsky's secretary.
Sats had met Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin C Level Contact List and used to talk to me about them, so I had an image of those C Level Contact List characters and their personal interactions that was not captured in the literature at the time. In particular, she used to talk about it with political scientist Jerry Hough, to whom she was then married. Jerry always said to me, "You should write this because it gives a picture of Soviet politics that we just C Level Contact List don't have." But I didn't do it because I wanted to do social history.
Long after C Level Contact List Jerry and I got divorced—very amicably—I thought, "Why not do it?"ussr , you could do some really interesting political history work." And I thought that maybe this could add something to the C Level Contact List way we see and think about Stalin himself. Because there have been a lot of studies on Stalin, but almost all of them are biographical. I did not intend to nullify that work, nor to say "No, it is the C Level Contact List Politburo that runs everything, not Stalin." I was trying to see how the Politburo fit into the Stalinist system.