Stephan Merl is professor of East European History at Bielefeld University, Germany. His main research fields cover history of agricultural policy and agricultural development, comparative history of political institutions, consumption and consumption policy in Eastern Europe, Soviet Command Economy, agricultural cooperatives, Sovietization and De-Stalinization in Eastern Europe. He holds honorary doctorates from Yaroslavl Pedagogical State University of Russian Federation and Mongolian State University of Education of Mongolia. Between 1988 and 1991 he held a replacement professorship in “International Agricultural Policy” at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen and studied the starting of the agricultural transformation process in Eastern Europe. In 1991, he got the professorship of East European History at Bielefeld University, and was the dean of Faculty of History, Theology and Philosophy for years. Between 1994 and 2010 he was vice chair of the German “Master of Business Administration” at the Academy of the National Economy with the President of the Russian Federation. He was the coordinator for the cooperation of our Bielefeld university with Yaroslavl Pedagogical University, Mongolian State University of Education and some other Russian universities. He published several books and articles on Soviet agriculture, among them: Agricultural market and the New Economic Policy (1981); Peasants under Stalin (1999).