Who was not a member of any political party Country Email List but had contacts with communists as well as with figures from the Labor Party and even with some Liberals. Today I'm not sure if he admired my father's role as mediator or criticized it, but I Country Email List was interested as a self-definition and modus operandi . In 1966 I went to the USSR for a year of research as a British exchange student, hoping to be allowed to work on Country Email List Lunacharsky's personal papers, which were in the Communist Party archives.
The Soviets did not like to give access to Country Email List Soviet-era archives to foreigners and they refused me the consultation. However, after a few months of struggle, I was allowed into the State Archives, considered less politically Country Email List sensitive, to work on the archives of the Lunacharsky ministry (Narkompros) from the 1920s. Those Narkompros materials were absolutely fascinating. Through them I learned about Lunacharsky, but above all I began to understand how politics worked in the ussr. The prevailing idea Country Email List about the ussr , encapsulated in the totalitarian model, held that all policy was formulated in the Politburo and then passed down.
But what I discovered in the files was that the Country Email List Ministry of Education formulated policies (just like other ministries, departments of the Central Committee of the Party, etc.) and then tried to put pressure on the Politburo, the Country Email List government, the Council of Ministers and the people who they integrated it so that their policies were approved. Sometimes they were successful and sometimes they were not, but I was seeing a political process that the totalitarian model simply did not allow to see. When you began your historiographical Country Email List studies of Soviet communism, this "totalitarian school" perspective was predominant in Sovietology .