A biographer who reshaped the study of Soviet leadership
William Taubman is an American political scientist and historian of Soviet politics and the Cold War. After years of research, he published Khrushchev: The Man and His Era in 2003, a biography that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book presents Khrushchev as both an heir to and a critic of Stalinism, placing the secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress within the leader’s character and institutional setting. Taubman also wrote studies of Gorbachev and Stalin’s American policy, tracing the relationship between Soviet leadership and international politics.
Career Timeline
- 1962B.A., Harvard University
- 1965M.A., Columbia University, and Certificate of the Russian Institute
- 1969Ph.D. in political science, Columbia University
- 1982Published Stalin’s American Policy
- 2003Published Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
- 2004Won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Khrushchev
- 2009President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
- 2017Published Gorbachev: His Life and Times