E. A. Rees is Professor of Eastern European History at the European University Institute, Florence. Prior to this appointment he worked at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. He specialises in the political history of the Soviet Union/Russia in the twentieth century. His most recent monograph is Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism (2004), and he is the editor of The Nature of Stalin's Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953 (2004). He has recently completed a political biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin's chief lieutenants, and is currently working on a study of the culture of revolutionary violence in late tsarist Russia.