The defection of the Soviet diplomat Country Email List Vladimir Petrov, which led to the creation in 1954 of a Royal Commission on Espionage [ Royal Commission on Espionage]. In the hysteria that followed, some members of Parliament began to question the Country Email List loyalty of the person who headed the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. It was a kind of legally permitted smear campaign. She was a Russian named Country Email List Nina Mikhailovna Christesen, married to the director of a literary magazine who was a friend of my father.
My parents, like other members of the Country Email List left-wing intelligentsia with college-age children, suggested that I study Russian so that Nina's number of students would increase and things would be easier for her. So that's what I did. She took the first Country Email List Russian course, which was all that was required. But after I finished that course, I thought, “I don't know enough about the language to make it useful. I will also do the second year». And in fact, I took the second year in Russian, which gave me enough reading knowledge to take the risk of dealing with a Country Email List opic using Russian sources for my fourth year history research essay.
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 People's Commissar for Country Email List 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 generally Country Email List benevolence. But there were some good reasons for undertaking a study of Lunacharsky.