I am from an Anglo-Jewish family of East European origin and grew up in North London in the 1950s and 1960s. At the age of 16 I joined the Socialist Party of Great Britain, attracted by the vision of a new society presented by the SPGB and its companion parties and groups in the World Socialist Movement (WSM). After studying mathematics and statistics, I worked for a number of years in the Government Statistical Service, a section of Britain’s civil service. Then in 1979 I entered the field of Soviet Studies at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES). My Ph.D. was on the methods used in the Soviet Family Budget Survey. In 1983 I acted as an assistant to the then-influential Soviet journalist and political scientist Fyodor Burlatsky. From 1984 to 1991 I was one of a group of Soviet Studies people who brought out the journal Détente. In 1989 I moved with my wife and two young children to Providence, Rhode Island in the United States to take up a post on the faculty of Brown University. I taught in the International Relations Program. Things that I saw and heard on my visits to Russia in the early 1990s led me to take seriously the parallels between post-Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany. This concern inspired research that culminated in my second book, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements, published in 2001. In 2006 I rejoined the WSM by becoming a member of the World Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS).