A historian who forecast the Soviet collapse
Writing as “Z,” he predicted that Gorbachev could not overcome communism's contradictions, then later acknowledged the essay.
Martin Malia was an American historian of Russia and European intellectual history who taught and researched at Berkeley. In The Soviet Tragedy, he argued that socialism's comprehensive attempt to abolish capitalism also undermined economic and political freedom, making the Soviet system structurally resistant to self-correction. In 1990 he published the essay “To the Stalin Mausoleum” under the pseudonym Z, predicting that Gorbachev's reforms could not overcome communism's internal contradictions. His interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse, while critics argued that it reduced socialism's historical possibilities to a defect in ideology itself.
Career Timeline
- 1944BA in French, Yale University
- 1951PhD in history, Harvard University
- 1954–1958Assistant professor of history, Harvard University
- 1955Special assistant for Russian book acquisitions, Library of Congress
- 1958–1991Professor of history, University of California, Berkeley
- 1991–2004Professor emeritus at Berkeley; continued writing
- 1994Published The Soviet Tragedy