Silvio Pons is professor of eastern European history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and director of the Gramsci Institute Foundation in Rome. His books include The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-1953 and Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936-1941. Robert Service teaches Russian history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Comrades! A History of World Communism and A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, as well as biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky.