Vladislav Zubok
Research Interest
Biography
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 The Idea of Russia: The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev (2017), Dmitry Likhachev. The Life and the Century (in Russian, 2016) 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 PhD at the Institute for the USA and Canada in Moscow.
In 1994 he became a fellow at the National Security Archive, non-government organization at the University of George Washington. He continued his academic career in the United States as a visiting professor at Amherst College, Ohio University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan, and in 2004 became a tenured professor at Temple University.
His books earned the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for Advancement of Slavic Studies. Professor Zubok received numerous grants from the McArthur Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and from the Yeltsin foundation and the Russkii Mir foundation. Aside from academic work, Professor Zubok organized a number of international archival and educational projects in Russia, Ukraine, and South Caucasus. He held numerous fellowships, including the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Wilson Center in Washington DC, Collegium Budapest, the Free University for Liberal Studies in Rome, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
Professor Zubok also consulted a number of documentary films, most importantly Sir Jeremy Isaac’s twenty-four series “Cold War” on CNN.
His latest book, Collapse. The Fall of the Soviet Union, was published by Yale University Press (London) in October 2021 and is a study of Soviet collapse within the context of globalization, economics, and nationalism.
Other LSE titles: Research Committee Chair
Courses
Professor Vladislav Zubok teaches the following courses:
At undergraduate level:
At postgraduate level:
Biography
Professor Vladislav Zubok recent publications include:
- Collapse. The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021)
- "An Abiding Antagonism: Realism, Idealism and the Mirage of Western–Russian Partnership after the Cold War", International Politics, Vol. 54, No. 4, 405-419 (2017).
- "The Soviet Union and China in the 1980s: reconciliation and divorce", Cold War History, Vol. 17, No. 2, 121-141 (2017).
- The Idea of Russia: The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev (I.B.Tauris, 2017)
- Dmitry Likhachev. The Life and the Century (in Russian, Vita Nova, 2016)
- "Russia, the U.S., and the Backstory behind the Breakdown" The Wilson Quarterly (Winter, 2016)
- “Gorbachev, German Reunification, and Soviet Demise,” Frederic Bozo, Andreas Roedder, Mary Sarotte, eds., German Unification: A Multinational History (Routledge, 2016)
- “'Do not think I am soft…': Leonid Brezhnev," Steven Casey, Jonathan Wright, eds., Mental Maps in the Era of Detente and the End of the Cold War 1968-91 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 6-23.
- “H-Diplo Roundtable on Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev”, H-Diplo Roundtable Review, 2015, Vol. XVI, No. 24.
- “With His Back Against the Wall: Gorbachev, Soviet Demise, and German Reunification,”Cold War History, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 4, 619–645.
- "Soviet intellectuals after Stalin’s death and their visions of the cold war’s end” in: Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Bernd Rother, eds,. Overcoming the Iron Curtain: Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–1990. Vol. 11, Contemporary European History (Berghahn Books, March 2012).
- D.S.Likhachev v obshchestvennoi zhizni Rossii kontsa XX veka [Dmitry Likhachev in the public life of Russia at the end of the 20th century] (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom, October 2011).
- Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia (il Mulino, Bologna 2011), editor with Tommaso Piffer. [Published in English by Central European University Press in 2017 under the title Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition]
- Masterpieces of History: A Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989, editor with Svetlana Savranskaia and Thomas Blanton (Central European University Press, 2010).
- Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Harvard University Press, 2009).
- A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007).