Vojtech Mastny
Vojtěch Mastný
1936–
A historian who opened the Cold War archives
In 1962, he left a Soviet cruise ship during a stop in Tunis and applied for a U.S. visa.
Vojtech Mastny was a Czech-American historian of the Cold War and Soviet foreign policy. Barred from the conventional educational path by his class background, he worked in factories and archives before emigrating to the United States in 1962, an experience that reinforced his attention to fragmentary evidence. He interpreted the Warsaw Pact not simply as a unified military alliance, but through the tension between a politically motivated bargaining instrument and a mechanism of Soviet discipline, testing both views against archival records. As coordinator of the Parallel History Project, he connected documents and testimony from the socialist military sphere to international scholarship.
Career timeline
- 1936Born in Prague
- 1950sWorked as a mechanic and studied at a workers' school
- late 1950s–1962Assistant archivist at the National Museum; studied medieval history and archival studies at Charles University
- 1962Emigrated to the United States and studied at Columbia University
- 1970s–presentTaught history and international relations at Columbia, Illinois, Boston University, Johns Hopkins SAIS and other institutions
- 1996–1998First NATO Manfred Wörner Fellow
- 1990s–presentCoordinated the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact
- 2005Published A Cardboard Castle? with Malcolm Byrne