1952–
A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history
Forty years on he wrote, "In a way, Chernobyl created glasnost."
David Marples is a Canadian historian at the University of Alberta who studies the modern history and politics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. He was an early analyst of Chernobyl’s social and political consequences, beginning with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, published in the year of the accident, and later work on nuclear policy, safety, and the responses of states and affected communities. His research expanded to national history, famine, and the Soviet collapse, while treating Chernobyl as an important influence on the USSR’s crisis without reducing that collapse to a single cause.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1975BA, University of London
- 1980MA in History, University of Alberta
- 1985PhD in Economic and Social History, University of Sheffield
- 1987Published Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR
- 1988Published The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster
- 1991Published Ukraine Under Perestroika
- 2004–2014Director, Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine, University of Alberta
- 2010–2015President, North American Association for Belarusian Studies
Related historical events
From Chernobyl Studies to Government Consulting on Belarus
Marples's research began with Chernobyl and expanded toward Belarus and Ukraine. Starting with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (1987), he examined nuclear-power policy and the social and political aftermath of the accident; in 1996 he framed Belarus's history in Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. This body of work placed him among the leading Western specialists on the contemporary history of Belarus and Ukraine.
His academic career is bound up with the University of Alberta and with North American institutions for Ukrainian and Belarusian studies. From 2004 to 2014 he directed the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta, and from 2010 to 2015 he served as president of the North American Association for Belarusian Studies. In 2026 CIUS announced his reappointment as a research fellow, continuing his work on the war in Ukraine and his media commentary.
Alongside this he took part in governmental and nongovernmental consulting on Belarus, including work for the US Department of State, the US Embassy in Minsk, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, as well as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. These advisory relationships are reported in his own and institutional career accounts; they do not by themselves attribute any government's policy conclusions to him.