Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin was cut short before it began by the war. Harry joined up as soon as he was old enough, and the end of the war saw him a Cor- poral at Advanced Land Headquarters on Morotai (in the then Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia). During his time in the army he had the briefest of flirtations with membership of the Australian Communist Party. Like so many young men returning from war service, Harry found himself with the previously unthinkable opportunity to go to univer- sity. He initially enrolled in a pass degree in French and Dutch, but then transferred to an honours degree in French and Russian, ultimately dropping the French for Political Science. He studied Russian with Nina Mikhailovna Christesen, the first Russian he’d ever met. He didn’t study Soviet politics per se as an undergraduate, but the topic of his MA the- sis was ‘The Soviet View of Southeast Asia’. The thesis was supervised by Mac Ball and examined by Lloyd Churchward. He completed it in 1951 just before heading for London on a Melbourne University ‘travelling scholarship’.
Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin
