Martin McCauley is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. He has specialised in the politics and economics of Russia and Eastern Europe for over twenty-five years, and he acts as a consultant for investment in the former Soviet Union. He is the author of Stalin and Stalinism, The Origins of the Cold War, The Khrushchev Era, and is writing a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev.