Edward Acton is Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, UK, having previously been the Dean of the School of History and the Chair of Modern European History before that. He is the author of Russia: The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy (1995), co-author of the two-volume work, The Soviet Union: A Documentary History (2007), and co-editor of the Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 (2001).

This work is intended principally to allow the student and nonspecialist to acquire a reasonably sophisticated grasp of the historiography of the Russian revolution. In this, it succeeds strongly, largely due to a clarity of presentation grounded in the author's strong interpretational grasp. 'Rethinking the Russian Revolution' will likely become standard fare in university classrooms. Slavic Review