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Acknowledgments We could not have taken on an essay collection of this scope without the support of numerous friends and colleagues. Our first thanks go to our contributors for their essays and their patience as our project came into shape and progressed over the last several years. In 2009, we presented a version of our introduction at the annual meeting of the Midwest Russian History Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. We are grateful to all the faculty and graduate students at the session that day for their helpful suggestions and encouragement, with special thanks to Valerie Kivelson for her insightful comments on the text and Alexander Martin, our gracious host for the event. Janet Rabinowitch, our editor at Indiana University Press, has been remarkable . We thank her for all the enthusiasm, confidence, and editorial insight she has invested in our work since the moment we first spoke with her about the project. Jane Burbank and Robert Crews offered us rich and insightful critiques as readers for the Press—we are very grateful to them for this. Peter Froehlich of Indiana University Press helped us with numerous production questions. In addition, we would like to thank Angela Burton, our managing editor; Dawn Ollila for her talented copyediting of the manuscript; and Bill Nelson for his excellent maps. Finally, we wish to offer the most special of thanks to one of our contributors who is no longer with us—Richard Stites. Richard passed away before he could see his chapter appear in this book, but we still feel his presence. Over a long and accomplished career of teaching and writing about Russian history, he established himself as a remarkable presence in our field, touching many of us with his love for and deep knowledge of the Russian past—and even more with his generous nature as an intellectual, mentor, and friend. It is telling that neither of us formally studied with Richard, but both of us feel charmed to have known him and to have benefited from his rare blend of erudition and kindness. We so wish he could be here to give us his insightful reflections on all the complex and engaging lives captured in these pages. With great respect and affection, we dedicate this volume to him. ...

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