I have always had an interest in radical and left-wing politics, whether in the Third World or in the West. But I have never had much time for left-wing romanticism, whether about poor people in the Third World, or about the working class, women, or ethnic minorities in the West.

Also, while I am a big admirer of many of the things Marx had to say in criticism of capitalism, I have always thought his ideas about socialism to be very weak, and to have led - as much by default as anything else - to widespread illusions among left-wing people about what socialism could and should achieve.  

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s confirmed a lot of these doubts, and got me interested in doing fieldwork again, this time on Russian farm people - their experience of living under communism, and what was happening to them as 'the free market' hit. For this I learned elementary Russian (knowledge of which is now rapidly evaporating), spent two Russian summers doing survey research among farming people in four different provinces of European Russia, and wrote three lengthy academic articles on what I found. I had hoped to return to Russia to do a much more substantial and extended project on Agrarian Reform in Russia but failed to get funding for the project. So, sadly, this part of my work was aborted before it really got underway.

I did however summarize my thoughts about the fieldwork, and about Russian communism in general, in a piece called 'Nostalgic Confusions: An Old Leftie's Reflections on Two Summers in Russia'. This piece not only records my own youthful confusions about Marxism and communism, but also the confused responses of Russian people themselves to the end of communism and the arrival of capitalism. It was originally published in an Australian e journal called ' Mots Pluriels' which has now ceased to publish. You may download a copy here: http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP2002gk.html if interested.