1979?–
Cold War historian who analyzed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan as a 'long goodbye'
"A truly international history of the war... is at this point very far away," he conceded in the opening of A Long Goodbye.
A historian of Soviet and Russian foreign policy and Central Asia. His 2011 book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, drawing on archives and interviews, demonstrated that the Soviet decision to withdraw was a 'long goodbye' shaped as much by domestic politics as by the battlefield. After a BA at George Washington University and a PhD at the LSE, he taught for a decade at the University of Amsterdam and is now Professor at Temple University; his second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development (2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- ~2000BA, George Washington University
- 2009PhD in International History, LSE
- ~2010–2020Senior Lecturer in East European Studies, University of Amsterdam
- 2011A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press)
- 2018Laboratory of Socialist Development (Cornell UP); won Davis and Hewett prizes
- ~2020–Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Temple University
Related historical events
From Afghanistan to Central Asian development history: a research turn (2011– )
By Kalinovsky's own account, his first book's subject, how the Soviet Union carried out counter-insurgency and who was involved in it, became the point of departure for the next stage of his work. Working on it, he says, led him to pay more attention to Central Asia as a whole, to the role of Central Asians in Soviet policy, to the Soviet Union as a multinational and (post?) imperial space, and more broadly to the global history of development and welfare. Laboratory of Socialist Development (Cornell University Press, 2018; paperback 2021) is the product of that turn; it takes the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic as its focus and places the Soviet development of Central Asia in a global context. It won the Davis and Hewett prizes of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Harvard Davis Center profile names it together with A Long Goodbye as one of his two prize-winning books.
Kalinovsky has since extended this line of research to development history and to the entanglement of socialist and capitalist development approaches. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia in order to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late twentieth century; the project received support from the European Research Council in the form of a Consolidator grant. His edited and co-edited volumes include Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies in the Cold War Era, with Michael Kemper (Routledge, 2015), and Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, with Steffi Marung and James Mark (Indiana University Press, 2020). Themes of gender, ethnicity, and time in development also run through later articles such as 'Exceptions to Socialism: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Soviet Development in Comparative Perspective' (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023) and, with Isaac Scarborough, 'The Oil Lamp and the Electric Light: Progress, Time, and Nation in Soviet Central Asian Memoirs' (Kritika, 2021). He has also written op-eds and longer essays on contemporary affairs for outlets including Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times.