Silvio Pons is Professor of Contemporary History at the Università degli Studi di Roma 'Tor Vergata'. He is the President of the Gramsci Foundation in Rome and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cold War Studies. Recent publications include Stalin and the Inevitable War (2014); A Dictionary of Twentieth Century Communism (2010) and The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism (2014). He has extensively researched and written on the Cold War, the Soviet Union, European Communism, and global Communism. Stephen A. Smith is a historian of modern Russia and China, a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Professor of History in Oxford University. Recent publications include Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890–1928 (2017). His current research focuses on 'supernatural politics', comparing the ways in which peasants in Soviet Russia (1917–41) and in China (1949–76) used the resources of popular religion and magic to make sense of the turbulent changes that overwhelmed their lives in the course of the Communist revolutions.