Edwin Bacon is Reader in Comparative Politics at Birkbeck, the University of London. He has published widely on Russian affairs, including books on the domestic politics of Putin (Securitising Russia, 2006), the Brezhnev years (Brezhnev Reconsidered, 2002), and forced labour in the Stalin era (The Gulag at War, 1994). He is also the author of Contemporary Russia (Palgrave, 2014), now in its third edition. Dr Bacon has served as a Specialist Adviser to the House of Common’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and as a Senior Research Officer in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has advised the Finnish parliament’s Committee for the Future, and in Autumn 2014 was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki.