Stalin met with members of his C Level Contact List Politburo (or sometimes an ad hoc body)which overlapped with the formal Politburo) practically every day for several hours. That means that the Politburo had a function that Stalin considered important. Stalin was a hard-working man and it was impossible to think that he would C Level Contact List spend time with them unless the Politburo had a definite goal and task. That was my starting point: that the Politburo had to have government functions and tasks because otherwise Stalin would C Level Contact List not have spent time in daily dialogue with its members. And it was very clear that he was spending time there because his office records were available. Every hour of his day in the office C Level Contact List was recorded. That allowed me to develop my work, especially since those records were also published in Australia, and when I started working on the subject,ussr . Let me ask you C Level Contact List about your own history as a researcher. What was it like working in the Soviet archives? It was difficult. It was especially so in the 60s and 70s because they didn't deliver catalogs or guides. They C Level Contact List did not say what material they had. They didn't publish it either. So you had to talk to an archives clerk and say, "My subject is such-and-such, and I want such-and-such stuff. So of course, they could C Level Contact List understand you better or worse, and they could be more or less collaborative. It was really difficult to get material that way, to the point that, in the process, I learned a lot about bureaucracy and archives. If you asked for, for example, the minutes of the meetings of a certain institution, but the C Level Contact List minutes were called protocols, they might not bring them unless they liked you. But if you said "I want protocols" and they had protocols, they often felt compelled to bring them. And C Level Contact List once you had the protocols or the minutes, then you could better continue the work, date by date. Now, a lot of the archivists, those junior officials that I dealt with, they were tremendously helpful. They did what they could for me, and often very willingly.