Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, Reading Room
Kathryn Wasserman Davis Lecture
In late December 1991 – some 74 years after the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had taken power in Russia – the Soviet regime and the Soviet state itself formally ceased to exist. This momentous event occurred less than seven years after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soon after taking office in March 1985, Gorbachev had launched a series of drastic changes that he hoped would improve and strengthen the Communist system. But these changes, far from strengthening Communism, led inadvertently to the unraveling of the Soviet state.
Vladislav Zubok is professor of international history, with expertise on the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Stalinism, and Russia’s intellectual history in the 20th century. His most recent books are A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007) and Zhivago’s Children: the Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009).
Professor Zubok was born and educated in Moscow. He studied for his undergraduate degree at the Moscow State University and studied for his Ph.D. at the Institute for the USA and Canada in Moscow.
He is currently completing a book entitled Saving Russian Patriotism on the life and works of prominent St. Petersburg intellectual Dmitry S. Likhachev. In 1991, he started a new project entitled: "‘Russia’ destroys the Soviet Union, a study of Soviet collapse within the context of globalization, economics, and nationalism."
Vladislav Zubok, Professor of International History and Undergraduate Programme Director, London School of Economics and Political Science
Sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
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