Ask the Author: Mark Harrison
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Mark Harrison
Right now I'm working on two things. One is a paper about preventive repression in the Soviet Union, which is joint work with Eugenia Nazrullaeva. The other is a collaborative project on the history of economic warfare, which Stephen Broadberry and I are leading together.
Mark Harrison
My most recent book is *Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism,* to be published on 6 June. I was inspired to write it by three things. One, my interest in communism, which arose from growing up during the Cold War and visiting the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time I learned that Soviet communism was super-secretive. Two, during the 1990s I spent time working on the Soviet defence industry in formerly secret Russian archives: there I found that Soviet factory managers and engineers habitually exploited state secrecy to conceal self-interested behaviour. From this I learned that secrecy is complex and intriguing. Three, in the 2000s I came across the archives of the KGB (secret police) of Soviet Lithuania, which showed me that the KGB was in charge of the whole system (or "regime") of secrecy.
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