Soviet history has seldom been of such importance--both to historians and to a broader public in the USSR--as it now is. In this timely volume, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, using a breadth of source material including Soviet archives and the local press, present the most recent thinking and up-to-date research available. The original essays discuss Gorbachev and Soviet history, the changing nature of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of shopfloor culture between the wars, and the evolution of the political elite from the 1930s to the present day.