Nina Tumarkin is Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies, Professor of History and Director of the Russian Area Studies Program at Wellesley College, and Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her current book project, Russia Remembers the War, builds on her previous books, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (Basic Books) and Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Harvard University Press). Its special focus is on the ways in which the memory of the Soviet experience of World War II resonates among various strata of Russian society—including the tens of thousands of volunteers still search for the more than one million MIAs—even as the Kremlin deploys it to justify its horrific war in Ukraine.
Professor Tumarkin has twice chaired the Wellesley College History Department and serves the as longtime director of the College’s Russian Area Studies Program. Harvard’s Russian Research Center and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies has been Professor Tumarkin’s scholarly home for more than half a century. Her past career has included the role of advisor to President Ronald Reagan, for whom she wrote two invited papers and served as one of six Soviet experts who briefed the President, Vice-President, and key cabinet members on the eve of Mr. Reagan’s historic first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit. In 1995 President Bill Clinton read Professor Tumarkin’s book, The Living and the Dead, in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow. “It’s a great book!” he wrote, “I’m working my way through it.”
