Harley Balzer

Harley Balzer earned his MS and PhD degrees in History at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from his positions in the Department of Government, the School of Foreign Service, and the Department of History at Georgetown University in 2016. He was appointed Director of Georgetown’s Russian Area Studies Program in 1987. During his tenure, he oversaw its transition to the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, and the Center became one of the Title VI Area Studies National Resource Centers.

Prior to Georgetown, he taught at Grinnell College and Boston University, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Russian Research Center (now Davis Center) and the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He was a U.S. Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow in 1996-97.

Dr. Balzer lived in the Soviet Union for full years 1975-76 and 1985-86 on IREX, Fulbright-Hays and Academy of Science grants, returned regularly during the Gorbachev era, and visited the Russian Federation more than 50 times since 1991. He organized the initial visits to the U.S. by the Russian Federation’s first Ministers of Education (Eduard Dneprov) and Science & Technology (Boris Saltykov), and Yeltsin’s advisor on nationality policy (Galina Starovoitova).

In 1992-93, he was Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of the International Science Foundation, George Soros’s largest philanthropic project in the former Soviet Union. In 1997-98, Balzer helped design the MacArthur Foundation Basic Research and Higher Education Program to create Research and Education Centers at Russian University, and served on its Governing Council from 1998 to 2012. He served on the Board of Trustees at the European University in St. Petersburg for 14 years.

Dr. Balzer’s research interests include comparative authoritarianism, focusing on Russia and China; science and technology; education; and social history. His publications include Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform  (1989); Five Years That Shook the World: Gorbachev’s Unfinished Revolution (1991), which was named a CHOICE outstanding academic book; and Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (1996). FAILURE: Russia Under Putin, co-edited with Steven A. Fisher, was published in July 2025