And that led me to become a Country Email List historian of Russia. Although you are well known for your work on Stalinism, and also for your book The Russian Revolution, your first work was dedicated to the figure of Anatoli Lunacharsky, the Country Email List People's Commissar for Education after the October Revolution. Why was she attracted to that particular character? It wasn't exactly because he was my hero, though I did look at him with interest and Country Email List generally benevolence.
But there were some good reasons Country Email List for undertaking a study of Lunacharsky. First of all, in the ussrthey had just begun to publish their collected works. That is to say, they were publishing the necessary material to develop an intellectual biography, which is what I initially intended to write. In the Oxford libraries you could find much of the Country Email List pre-revolutionary material, but then the Soviets were publishing a fairly comprehensive collection of his post-revolution writings. As I delved into the subject, I became quite distant from Lunacharsky as an intellectual, and therefore from my initial biographical project. He was a Country Email List popularizer, basically very eclectic, who collected many ideas and intertwined them very quickly in a kind of narrative that was not usually very deep.
However, his activity as People's Country Email List Commissar for Education (a sort of Enlightenment commissar),ussr to investigate. And I ended up writing my dissertation on that. There was another aspect that interested me in Lunacharsky and it Country Email List was the one that was linked to his role as self-proclaimed mediator between the intelligentsia and the Communist Party. I think this had something to do with my father, who had, in fact, developed Country Email List an informal political role in Australia as a back room mediator, someone.