Biographical note

David Lane is currently Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and University Lecturer in Sociology. Previously he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham and a member of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies there. He was a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and has been on the faculty of the University of Essex. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell University and Graz University (Austria) and has held short-term research grants at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. He has travelled in all the Eastern European countries (except Albania), and has visited the USSR on more than twenty occasions. Professor Lane’s publications include Politics and Society in the USSR (1970) and most recently Soviet Labour and the Ethic of Communism: Employment and the Labour Process in the USSR (1987) and Political Power and Elites in the USSR (1988).