Condoleezza Rice (foreword) was the sixty-sixth US secretary of state under George W. Bush. She is currently the director of the Hoover Institution. Charles G. Palm is the deputy director emeritus of the Hoover Institution, where he was an archivist and librarian for thirty-one years, the last eighteen directing the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. His published works include Milton Friedman on Freedom and Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives. Charles Chadwyck-Healey (appendix) is founder of the Chadwyck-Healey Group of academic publishing companies, now part of ProQuest. Stephen Kotkin (introduction) is the Kleinheinz Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. His books include Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 19291941 and Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 18781928.
"""Scholars, including perhaps most importantly scholars from Russia, will be using these materials for many decades. . . . It's a fantastic story."" --Michael McFaul, director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and former US ambassador to Russia ""An international collaboration that profoundly affected scholarship and helped render history's judgment on a dangerous, pathological ideology."" --Anne Applebaum, author of the Pulitzer PrizeĀ-winning Gulag: A History ""Of great interest . . . to anyone who wants a better understanding of Russian politics and archival affairs during the first decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union."" --Mark Kramer, director of Cold War studies, Harvard University ""The achievement was literally historic. This book tells the fascinating, at times gripping, story."" --Mark Harrison, emeritus professor of economics, University of Warwick ""Against considerable odds, Palm pulled off one of the most complex and successful coups in modern national-archives history."" --Paul Gregory, research fellow, Hoover Institution, and Cullen Professor Emeritus, University of Houston"