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Acknowledgments This book has been eleven years in the making, from the moment of its conceptualization in the Smolensk Regional Archive in December 1989 to my submission of the final version in December 2000. When I read my first fire materials in what was then the USSR, I had access to world news in Moscow primarily via BBC radio. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and citizens across Eastern Europe were rising up in demonstrations that made the unbroken routines outside my hotel window on October Square especially disheartening. Email was not yet a method of communication. The grocery stores in Moscow were empty most of the time, and I depended on water from the US embassy and Fanta soft drinks as potable fluids for my two-year-old son. In the month ofmy initial research in the (then) Lenin Library in Moscow and the public library in (then) Leningrad, Andrei Sakharov died, and I joined in his memorialization with thousands of Leningrad citizens. My next research trip found me sitting in front of the television in Moscow as Gorbachev resigned and the USSR dissolved. Before the book was finished, I would pay over a million inflated rubles to stay in a Best Western hotel in Novgorod, then two years later sleep in the lavishly restored Hotel Grand Europe in St. Petersburg as the director of a university partnership . My most beloved Russian friend, Viktor Iakovlovich Frenkel, would die of a stroke at 62, due to the strain he endured as a member of the intelligentsia in the collapsed economy of the post-Soviet transition. In sum, during the eleven years it has taken me to research and write this book, the culture I study has been in constant transition. The transition has brought challenges and opportunities of unanticipated access to archives, which generated an irresistible obliVII gation to travel to Russia frequently, at a rate no historian of Russia a mere decade earlier would have imagined either possible or necessary. In these highly unstable times, I have completed a book of this scope only with considerable help from institutions and individuals. Among the institutions, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) funded several of my research trips to the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University also supported initial phases of research. Rutgers University, Camden College, provided leave time for me to go to the Soviet Union. The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research funded the early work on arson. The University of New Hampshire provided funds through the Arthur K. Whitcomb Professorship and the College of Liberal Arts. The US Department ofState made it possible for me to do archival research in Vologda. Libraries and their staff members in the United States and Russia provided significant assistance. In Russia, the women who work in the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library in St. Petersburg, in the reading room and photocopying office, have been unfailingly pleasant and helpful. It has been an honor to work there. In the United States, Debbie Watson at the University of New Hampshire graciously handled request upon request for materials that miraculously (or so it seemed to me) appeared from Moscow within three weeks on average. Since 1989, archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Smolensk, Novgorod, and Vologda have been fully available to me. Mikhail Naumovich Levitin in Smolensk provided access to the files of the governor's chancellery during a 1989 visit, which yielded the first data I saw on village fires. The staff of the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg guided me to the rich materials in the files of the Economic Division of the Ministry of Interior. Sergei Mikhailovich Kazantsev secured entry for me to the Firefighting Museum in St. Petersburg in 1995 and permission to use figure 2.1. lakov Viktorovich Frenkel did the preliminary survey of files in the Novgorod Regional Archive in 1997 to make it possible for me to make a quick and productive trip there that fall. In Vologda, Vladimir Nikolaevich Koshko eased access to the regional archive. I have also been blessed with generous colleagues among fellow historians and Slavists. Most important has been Stephen]. Pyne, who has been a source of support, bibliographical leads, editorial counsel, and inspiration from the beginning. Eric L. Jones and Johan Goudsblom also were exceptionally responsive in their reading of the early chapters. Participants at the University of Toronto conference on judicial reform...

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