Bored this afternoon, I did a little Google search on this "famous historian" called E H Carr (whom Manushi quotes in the beginning). Carr seems "famous" for writing Soveet history, that too in the 1930s and the 1940s. Too bad that he Carr not live to see the fall of the USSR. Carr died in 1982. From Wikipedia, an extract: "Carr's writings include biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1931), Karl Marx (1934), and Mikhail Bakunin (1937), as well as important studies on international relations and his History of Soviet Russia (14 vol., 1950–78). During World War II, Carr was favorably impressed with what he regarded as the extraordinary heroic performance of the Soviet people, and towards the end of 1944 Carr decided to write a complete history of the Soviet Union from 1917 until the present comprising all aspects of social, political and economic history in order to explain how the Soviet Union withstood the challenge of the German invasion. The resulting work was his History of Soviet Russia. In Carr's view, Soviet history went through three periods in the inter-war era and was personified by the change of leadership from Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Stalin." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._H._Carr oohi ashu