Renowned Russian historian Reginald E. Zelnik's final publication is a biography of Anna Pankratova, a woman from Odessa who became a leading labour historian and academic administrator in the Soviet Union, from the 1920s to her death in 1957. Drawing upon archival materials once inaccessible to Western scholars, as well as memoirs published since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zelnik conceptualized his study as one of "constrained dissent," in the sense that Pankratova, a Communist scholar loyal to the Party, nevertheless courageously sought to protect her colleagues, students, and friends from disaster. Portraying Pankratova as both "victim" and "victimizer," Zelnik treats in evocative detail several revealing episodes in her career as "the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union's history profession." In addition, five essays by other scholars address Zelnik's scholarship as a labor historian. The volume also includes excerpts from two Soviet texts, one of them Pankratova's historic 1956 speech on the menace of Stalinist legacies in history and historiography.