Michael G. Kort is Professor of Social Science in the College of General Studies at Boston University, USA, and has been a fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, USA. In addition to his work on Soviet history, he is the author of The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (1998), The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (2007), A Brief History of Russia (2008), The Vietnam War Reexamined (2018), and co-author of Modernization and Revolution in China (5th ed. 2018). He has written more than a dozen books for young adults, including biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, a history of the Cold War, and a history of Marxism. The first edition of The Soviet Colossus was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.