By "official Russian history" I mean the sort of history that appears in textbooks and official statements. I didn't mean to imply that there is no historical scholarship in Russia.

But I do find Mr Doss's take on Russian historiography odd. Is he saying that there are Russian-language books about the Gulag which are superior to Anne Applebaum's work? If so, I would be interested to know about them. If he accepts that Gulag breaks new ground, how can it be a defence of Russian publishers simply to say that the author is American, therefore ipso facto unpublishable. That seems to me to be a rather weak argument.

If a Russian author wrote a comparably innovative book about the slave trade, or Jim Crow, I would not expect it to be a bestseller in America (although it might be). But I do think some academic or specialist publisher somewhere would think it worth putting on the market

regards

Edward Lucas
Central and Eastern Europe correspondent
The Economist.