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“... In 1969 Stalin’s closest associate, Vyasheslav Molotov, in retirement and disgrace, transferred to the Central Party Archive in Moscow 77 letters and notes which he had received from Stalin in the tumultuous decade 1925-36. The letters were stored in complete secrecy for 20 years. In 1989 they were made available to a handful of Soviet historians, and the following year 20 of the most important letters were published in Soviet journals ...”

“... Yeltsin’s first volume of autobiography, Against the Grain (1990), showed how he emerged from obscurity as a defender of democracy and social justice. In March 1989, against the wishes of Gorbachev and the Party bosses, he was elected Mayor of Moscow with nearly 90 per cent of the vote. In his second volume, The View from the Kremlin (1994), Yeltsin described how in June 1991 he became the first elected President of Russia ...”

“... Western historians have been struggling for decades to get into the archives of the Stalin period. In the early Eighties, before Gorbachev took office, we were granted very limited access, but were forbidden to see the finding aids and were segregated in a special foreigners’ reading-room. The real transformation came after the defeat of the August 1991 coup ...”

“... of the original, and the collaborator on two of the volumes of the History of Soviet Russia, R.W. Davies, has examined these and offered, in a 28-page introduction, notes towards a second edition. But would a second edition have introduced any substantial differences? On the evidence presented here one feels bound to doubt it. It is significant that the ...”

“... of Soviet citizens became passionately involved in studying their country’s past’: so R.W. Davies begins his book on the re-examination of Soviet history. He does not exaggerate. Of the subjects illuminated by glasnost, history has been the most hotly and widely debated of all. Nor is this surprising: besides the intellectual and moral need to come to ...”

“... as a historical judgment is fiercely debated. The principal economic historian of the period, R.W. Davies, has written of the large capacity for economic development within the NEP’s parameters. In his view, the New Economic Policy was not just a strategy for recovery from the Great War and the Civil War: it also presented opportunities for further ...”

“... and social history of the Soviet Union in the Thirties have resulted. Historians such as R.W. Davies, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Moshe Lewin have in different ways substantially revised the conventional picture of the period. Instead of a monolithic regime systematically implementing its strategy for constructing a totalitarian system, their research shows ...”

“... population, and each had demographic consequences that reach into the present. The historians R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft have put ‘excess deaths’ from the First World War, Revolution and Civil War – including those caused by disease and mass hunger – at 14.5 million. The effects on the Soviet population of political repression and the famine of ...”

“... philosophy in Swansea since 1967, and Michael Cohen, a former Tory voter described by Sir Michael Davies as a ‘careful and reasonable sort of person’. In early 1990, all four lecturers, Hunt, Maclean, Williamson and Cohen, formally complained to the Academic Secretary of the University, Mr Jeffrey Pritchard, about standards at the Health Care Centre. Mr ...”

“... with further inquiry. In Foundations, he was lucky to acquire the partnership of Professor R.W. Davies, of the Centre for Russian Studies at Birmingham, and who knows the Soviet economy very thoroughly.6 It was this partnership which saved Carr’s book from going to bits: Foundations has great strength in its discussion of the planning machine, of the ...”

“... in movements of this kind: precipitation, bonding and legitimation, functions emphasised by C.S.L. Davies and by S.M. Harrison in his account of the supposedly religionless rising in the Lake Counties. To restrict ‘religion’ in the 16th century to matters ‘spiritual’ and to ‘Catholic idealism’, even to exclude the preservation of monasteries as a ...”