1924–2004
○ Natural causes
A historian who forecast the Soviet collapse
Writing as “Z,” he predicted that Gorbachev could not overcome communism's contradictions, then later acknowledged the essay.
Martin Malia was an American historian of Russia and European intellectual history who taught and researched at Berkeley. In The Soviet Tragedy, he argued that socialism's comprehensive attempt to abolish capitalism also undermined economic and political freedom, making the Soviet system structurally resistant to self-correction. In 1990 he published the essay “To the Stalin Mausoleum” under the pseudonym Z, predicting that Gorbachev's reforms could not overcome communism's internal contradictions. His interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse, while critics argued that it reduced socialism's historical possibilities to a defect in ideology itself.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1944BA in French, Yale University
- 1951PhD in history, Harvard University
- 1954–1958Assistant professor of history, Harvard University
- 1955Special assistant for Russian book acquisitions, Library of Congress
- 1958–1991Professor of history, University of California, Berkeley
- 1991–2004Professor emeritus at Berkeley; continued writing
- 1994Published The Soviet Tragedy
Related historical events
- 1987–1991The Economic Reform Debate and the 500 Days Programmeleading historian of the unreformability thesisArgued that the Soviet system was ideologically incapable of self-correction, anchoring one side of the historiographical debate.
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSRInterpreter of the Soviet collapseHis interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse.
Formation as an Intellectual Historian and the Herzen Study
Malia was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1924, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and took a bachelor's degree in French at Yale in 1944. He then studied history at Harvard, earning a master's degree in 1947 and a doctorate in 1951. His principal teacher at Harvard was Mikhail Karpovich, a pioneer of Russian historical studies in the United States, and he was also strongly influenced by Crane Brinton and Isaiah Berlin. He spent two years at the elite École normale supérieure in Paris, where many of his fellow students later became influential intellectuals, and he maintained ties with France thereafter. From 1954 to 1958 he taught as an assistant professor of history at Harvard, and during a leave from Harvard he served as a special assistant for Russian book acquisitions at the Library of Congress. He moved to Berkeley in 1958 and taught Russian history there for more than three decades until his retirement in 1991. In this period his scholarly starting point was not the Russian Revolution or the Soviet system as such but nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history. His 1961 book Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855, which treated Herzen as both a recipient of Western socialist thought and a figure in the formation of the Russian intelligentsia, was widely reviewed as a masterpiece and established his reputation. There Malia presented Russian socialism not as an ideology imported from outside but as one that grew out of the intellectual searching of the Russian intelligentsia, a perspective that became the starting point for his later analyses of the Soviet system through the internal logic of its ideology.