“We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We’re focused on them,” he says, carefully.

Coincidentally, the human rights group Memorial this month released an online database of some 40,000 former Stalinist secret police agents.

Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets – Bernstein observed that the phrase “smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy”– but there is no exact equivalent in Russian.