Graeme Gill is Professor of Government and Public Administration at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. A long-time scholar of Soviet and Russian politics, his work covers all aspects of the politics of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, as well as democratisation and the history of the state. His books include The Collapse of a Single-Party System (Cambridge University Press, 1994), The Politics of Transition (with Stephen White and Darrell Slider, Cambridge University Press, 1993) and The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge