Every idea for a book has a particular genesis, and the genesis of this one lies in a monumental stupidity. When I first began to teach Soviet history, and for quite a few years thereafter, I was somehow possessed of the insane notion that the USSR's experience during World War II was essentially of military importance, and that the political and social history of the period were relatively uninteresting. I therefore used to race through this part of the syllabus as quickly as possible. I knew from standard texts, of course, that the war had seen a number of changes in state policy, for example, a tacit toleration of semi-private trade in agriculture and a rapprochement with the Orthodox Church, but I nevertheless managed to keep such inconvenient pieces of information from challenging my basic prejudices. Yet deep down inside I knew there was something not quite right with this interpretation. When I had read K. S. Karol's autobiography, Solik, I remember marvelling at his descriptions of the way in which soldiers separated from their units or whose companies had been destroyed or dispersed in battle wandered more or less freely around the country seeking another military unit to which they could attach themselves. Films about the war made in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years painted a similar picture of a population over which the state – the Stalinist police state – was exercising surprisingly little control during a time of dire national emergency.