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Lara Cook, in her laudatory review of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Books, 29 October), states that Stalin’s team “even into the 1930s, continued to wear a version of military uniform in civilian life”. The exception here is surely Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who was always dapper in a suit and tie, and whom Churchill regarded with “his smile of Siberian winter, his carefully measured and often wise words, his affable demeanour” as “the perfect agent of Soviet policy in a deadly world”.

R. E. Rawles
Honorary research fellow in psychology
University College London

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