The Swiss historian whose archival research overturned the received Yugoslav narrative of the Tito-Stalin split
Perović showed from newly opened East-bloc archives that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly over Albania, triggered the 1948 split, and that the 'Yugoslav path to socialism' was a post hoc myth.
A Swiss historian and political scientist, he is Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich and director of the Center for Eastern European Studies (CEES). His 2007 Journal of Cold War Studies article, 'The Tito-Stalin Split: A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence,' overturned the official Yugoslav narrative by using newly opened East-bloc archives to argue that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly the push to absorb Albania, rather than a distinct Yugoslav path to socialism, drove the 1948 split with Moscow. He has also produced significant work on the North Caucasus under Russian rule and on Soviet energy diplomacy, and founded and edits several online scholarly digests including the Caucasus Analytical Digest, extending East European studies to a broader public.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1991–1997Studied history, political science, and Russian literature at the University of Zurich
- 2001PhD from the University of Zurich; dissertation on Russian regionalism
- 1997–2005Head of the Russia/Eurasia program, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich
- 2008–2011Academic Associate, Department of History, University of Basel
- 2011–현재Professor of Eastern European History, University of Zurich
- 2014Habilitation at the University of Zurich; North Caucasus under Russian rule
- 2017Founded and directed the Center for Eastern European Studies (CEES), University of Zurich
Related historical events
Soviet and Russian Energy Diplomacy in History
Beyond the Yugoslav question and the North Caucasus, Perović has made Soviet and Russian energy diplomacy a principal line of research. In 2017 he edited Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas, a volume built on documents from Western and Eastern European archives that examines the role of oil and gas in East-West relations during the Cold War. A German-language synthesis, Rohstoffmacht Russland: Eine globale Energiegeschichte, followed in 2022, and in 2024 Cambridge University Press published his Fuel and Power: Energy, Trade, and Russian Foreign Relations from Lenin to Putin. That book traces Russia's rise from the late nineteenth century as a key oil producer and one of the world's leading exporters, and asks how energy exports became entangled with the country's foreign relations and with its domestic social and political transformation. Across this body of work Perović argues that the Soviet strategy of exporting energy and importing equipment rested on dependence on Western technology and capital, and that the resulting dependence weighed more heavily on the Soviet side than on the West. Reviewers have received the energy work as a reconstruction of Cold War energy politics from newly accessible archives and as a history of international cooperation and competition, transnational exchange and transborder interdependence mediated by Russian energy exports.