Silvio Pons is Professor of Contemporary History at the Università degli Studi di Roma 'Tor Vergata'. He is the President of the Gramsci Foundation in Rome and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cold War Studies. Recent publications include Stalin and the Inevitable War (2014); A Dictionary of Twentieth Century Communism (2010) and The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism (2014). He has extensively researched and written on the Cold War, the Soviet Union, European Communism, and global Communism.

Sophie Quinn-Judge is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2002) and the forthcoming, The Third Force in Vietnam: The Elusive Search for Peace. She was Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society at Temple University before retiring in 2015.