Robert Service, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, is a noted Russian historian and political commentator. In his recent book, Spies and Commissars, Service writes about the espionage and intrigue during the early years of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. In this Wall Street Journal review, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, the book is described as delving into the revolution of October 1917, the civil war, the Western intervention, the brutal measures by which Lenin won the war, and the Western attempts to strangle the regime in its cradle.

Click here to read the full review.

During a recent archival reconnaissance expedition to Latvia, in advance of yet another Hoover digitization project in the countries of the former USSR, Stanford history professor Amir Weiner came across an account of a 1967 visit to Stanford by Aleksandrs Drizulis, a high Soviet Communist Party official and historian. The following text is from Drizulis’s presentation to party activists on April 18, 1968.