The reason behind it was Job Function Email List the emblematic episode of the Cold War in Australia: the defection of the Soviet diplomat 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 loyalty of the person who headed Job Function Email List 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 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 left-wing Job Function Email List intelligentsia with college-age children,
Suggested that I study Russian so that Nina's number of students Job Function Email List would increase and things would be easier for her. So that's what I did. She took the first Russian course, which was all that was required. But after I finished that course, I thought, “I don't know enough Job Function Email List 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 topic using Job Function Email List Russian sources for my fourth year history research essay. And that led me to become a historian of Russia.
Although you are well known for your work on Stalinism, and also for your book Job Function Email List The Russian Revolution, your first work was dedicated to the figure of Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education after the October Revolution. Why was she Job Function Email List attracted to that particular character? It wasn't exactly because he was my hero, though I Job Function Email List did look at him with interest and generally benevolence. But there were some good reasons for undertaking a study of Lunacharsky.