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A historian who decoded the Cold War archives
The secret speech, translated into Polish, was no longer secret.
Mark Kramer is an American historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and political change in the socialist bloc and post-communist Eastern Europe. At Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, he directs the Cold War Studies program and has worked extensively in newly opened archives across the former Warsaw Pact and Western countries. His research on how Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech circulated through Poland traced how a text intended to remain confidential became a political force in de-Stalinization. Through research and editorial work, he treats Cold War history as an international process in which documents and information moved across borders, not only as a sequence of decisions by state leaders.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 현재Director, Cold War Studies program, Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
- 현재Editor, Journal of Cold War Studies
- 현재Editor, Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series
- 2006Published “Dethroning Stalin: Poland 1956 and Its Legacy”
- 2000년대Research on de-Stalinization in Eastern Europe and Cold War international history
- 1990년대 이후Archival research in former Warsaw Pact countries and the West
Related historical events
- 1944–1949The People's Democracies of Eastern EuropeHistorian of the "direction without a blueprint" readingIn a 2009 essay he concluded that Stalin had no detailed plan but that the direction of control was present from the start, and that the acceleration of 1947–48 responded to the Marshall Plan and the break with Tito.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret Speechscholar who traced the speech's circulationKramer researched how the secret speech circulated through Poland in 1956, providing a key source for this event page.
- 1989The Revolutions of 1989Historian of Soviet non-intervention in 1989He argued that Moscow’s decision not to intervene in political unrest among its allies helped bring about the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution.
Building the Research Infrastructure of the Opened Archives
A second axis of Kramer’s work has been building the material infrastructure of Cold War research. Until the early 1990s, Western scholars had no access to postwar archival materials in the former Eastern bloc: only trusted party or government employees could consult secret documents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and archival officials’ main responsibility was to keep any item out of the hands of unauthorized researchers. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union reversed that situation. Harvard’s Cold War Studies program was set up in the late 1990s to take advantage of the opening, building on work by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Security Archive in obtaining declassified materials and encouraging archival research. Kramer directs the program and made scholarly publication one of its chief instruments. The Journal of Cold War Studies, which he edits, was established in 1999 and is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal published by MIT Press for the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, carrying articles and book reviews grounded in research in East-bloc and Western archives. He also edits the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. The program additionally compiled a large database of declassified documents, available in microfilm and photocopies, and a document repository holding many thousands of copies for researchers. In his own scholarship Kramer has treated archival evidence as a way to test received accounts. In his book on the Warsaw Pact’s fate in 1985-1991, for example, he argues that the alliance was not destined to unravel under perestroika but was undone by a radical Soviet policy shift in early 1989, when Moscow ruled out using Soviet troops to defend communist regimes against internal unrest. That decision was not intended to dismantle the Pact, he argues, yet it opened space in which East European actors tested and finally broke the limits of Soviet tolerance.