The preeminent chronicler of Soviet memory politics who traced the Lenin cult and the Great Patriotic War myth
"People need to value what they have, and what Russians have always had is loss."
Born in 1945 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Nina Tumarkin is an American historian of Russia who has taught Soviet history and memory politics at Wellesley College since 1975. Her first book, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (1983), won the Wilson Prize, and her definitive study The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (1994) demonstrated how Stalin suppressed war memory, Brezhnev elevated it into a cult, and the cult was contested after 1985. One of six Soviet experts who briefed President Reagan before the 1985 Geneva Summit, she later learned that President Clinton read her book before his 1995 Moscow Victory Day visit and called it 'a great book.'
Career Timeline
- 1975–Professor of History, Wellesley College
- 1983Published Lenin Lives!, awarded the Wilson Prize
- 1985Soviet advisor to President Reagan, briefed for the Geneva Summit
- 1994Published The Living and the Dead
- 2000s–Director, Russian Area Studies Program, Wellesley College
- 1970s–Center Associate, Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies