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Professor Vladislav Zubok

Professor - Stevenson Professor of International History

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About

*Sabbatical Leave 2025-26*

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. Among his 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). His most recent book is: Collapse. The Fall of the Soviet Union, was published by Yale University Press (London and New Haven, USA) in October 2021, and available in paperbook and audiobook.

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. He also published in: The Spectator, The Foreign Affairs, Boston Globe, the Guardian, and other public venues. His most recent publication in Foreign Affairs (with Sergey Radchenko) is "Blundering on the Brink. The Secret Story and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis".

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Other titles: ; Head of the Cold War Studies programme

Expertise

Cold War; 20th-Century Russia