Evan Mawdsley is an international historian who has written extensively on the Second World War. Educated at Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, his work for many years dealt with twentieth-century Russian history, where he wrote and taught on the revolution, the civil war, the Stalin period and the nature of the Soviet-era political elite. His Russian Civil War, originally published in 1987, remains in print as a standard work on the subject. In the past fifteen years his research and writing have concentrated on the Second World...