1927–2008
○ Died
The historian who first reconstructed the Cuban Missile Crisis from Soviet archives
The American historian Robert Byrnes called him 'one of the most competent Soviet specialists on US history in the twentieth century.'
The historian who laid the academic foundations of American history studies in the postwar Soviet Union. A graduate of Leningrad State University's international relations program, he spent his entire career at the Leningrad Institute of History, producing over three hundred works spanning oil politics, the American Revolution, and US-Soviet relations. With Timothy Naftali, he was the first to mine the Soviet Communist Party and Kremlin archives to reveal the inside story of the Cuban Missile Crisis: their 1997 'One Hell of a Gamble' became a turning point in Cold War historiography, and their 2006 'Khrushchev's Cold War' won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature from the Royal United Services Institute.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1954Candidate of Historical Sciences
- 1954–1988Junior, senior, principal researcher, Leningrad Institute of History
- 1966Doctor of Historical Sciences
- 1987Corresponding Member, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1988–2008Head, Department of World History, Leningrad Institute of History
- 1990Full Member (Academician), USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1996–2002Academician-Secretary, History Division, Russian Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
The historian who opened the Kremlin archives: method and controversy behind One Hell of a Gamble
What defined Fursenko's late scholarship was access to Soviet party and state archives. Beginning in the 1990s a long collaboration with the American researcher Timothy Naftali, he brought the Presidium (party leadership) records of the Khrushchev era and Kremlin documents into large-scale use for the first time, reconstructing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from inside the Soviet leadership's decision-making. Their 1997 co-authored One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 drew on documents then unknown outside, including records of more than forty secret meetings between Robert Kennedy and his Soviet contact and Castro's early statements; the Russian edition appeared as Adskaya igra: sekretnaya istoriya karibskogo krizisa 1958-1964 (1999) and went through two Russian printings. The book became a bestseller in the United States and is regarded as a turning point in Cold War historiography for showing the crisis, on the basis of Soviet documents, not as a symmetrical US-Soviet confrontation but as a process entangled with Khrushchev's risky decisions and the independent interests of Third World leaders such as Castro and Nasser.
The method was also contested. The 2006 sequel Khrushchev's Cold War used Khrushchev's voice recordings and internal party meeting records to lay out the internal logic of Soviet foreign policy, but some reviewers flagged as a risk of bias the fact that Fursenko had effectively exclusive access to certain documents. The US State Department historian Michael Dobbs likewise raised questions about the verifiability of the book's use of documents. Even so, his late work opened a path for Cold War historians to engage Soviet-side materials seriously, and in 2007 the book received the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, awarded by Britain's Royal United Services Institute.