Nina Tumarkin
Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies & Professor of History
Historian of Russia, current research on Russian historical memory of the Soviet past.
My current research project, Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia, explores the many ways in which Russian political elites and groups from liberal oppositionists to ultra-nationalists have been remembering, celebrating, commemorating, condemning, condoning, forgetting, ignoring and grappling with the country’s troubled past and the vastly complex history and legacy of the Soviet experience in World War II and its fateful aftermath. I examine the historical politics informing the state’s protean “usable past” to support regnant political and social structures and norms. My work on the politics of multiple historical narratives builds on my previous books, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia and Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia.
My courses at Wellesley have engaged generations of Wellesley students in topics ranging across more than a millennium of Russian history as well as that of Europe in the twentieth century. Many of my classes are framed in the context of the politics of history in both Russian and Western scholarship. For example, when we study Peter the Great or Lenin, we also consider how Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin envisioned and made use of particular representations of those leaders. I teach courses on Medieval, Imperial, Soviet and Post-Soviet history and a comparative history seminar on World War II as Memory and Myth, which explores historical narratives about the war in several belligerent countries including France, Germany, Japan, the US, Poland and, of course, Russia. I twice chaired the History Department and serve as longtime director of the College’s rich Russian Area Studies Program.
My affiliation with Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies has been my longtime scholarly home in which for decades I have engaged in seminars, panels and collegial conversations. My past career has included the role of adviser to President Reagan, for whom I wrote two invited papers and served as one of six “Soviet experts” who briefed the President, Vice-President, and key cabinet members shortly before Mr. Reagan’s historic first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit. President Clinton read The Living and the Dead in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow in 1995.
Over the past dozen years I have much enjoyed lecturing on Wellesley and Harvard alumnae/alumni travel study programs in many countries. My recent favorites were: a visit to Albania; a sojourn in Mongolia followed by an extended journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad; lecturing on Japan’s memory of World War II in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; and cruising down the Volga River, visiting major sites connected with Russia in the seventeenth century. My hobby is singing Russian songs. (I suppose jogging around Wellesley’s lovely Lake Waban does not quite count as a hobby.)
LINKS
COURSES
HIST116 First-Year Seminar: Vladimir Putin: Personage, President, Potentate
HIST246 Vikings, Icons, Mongols, and Tsars
HIST247 Splendor and Serfdom: Russia Under the Romanovs
HIST248 The Soviet Union: A Tragic Colossus
HIST302 Seminar: World War II as Memory and Myth
Education
- B.A., University of Rochester
- M.A., Harvard University
- Ph.D., Harvard University
Current and upcoming courses
With Russian military forces surging through Ukraine in an unprovoked and catastrophic war that few in Russia or the West had predicted, as President Vladimir Putin threatens the annihilation of Ukraine’s statehood and the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, now is the time to plunge into a study of that authoritarian leader of the world’s largest country. What are the causes and consequences of this catastrophic conflict? How did Putin accumulate so much power? What have been his goals, values and operating principles? A product of Leningrad’s “mean streets,” the young Putin sought glory in the KGB, and after the demise of the Soviet Union—a collapse he rues to this day—moved into the heights of power. We will explore Vladimir Putin’s life path, political strategies and policies, ideas about Russia’s identity and place in the world, and his image as the epitome of both potent masculinity and the devil incarnate. We will also delve into Russian politics and society in the era of this enigmatic, potent, and murderous leader.
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This seminar explores the many ways that victors and vanquished, victims and perpetrators, governments, political groups, and individuals have remembered, celebrated, commemorated, idealized, condemned, condoned, forgotten, ignored, and grappled with the vastly complex history and legacy of World War II in the eight decades since the war's end. Our primary focus is the war in Europe, including Poland and Russia, although we will also consider the United States and Japan. We will investigate the construction of individual and collective memories about World War II and the creation and subsequent transformation of set myths about the war experience. In addition to books and articles, sources will include memoirs, primary documents, and films. We will also study the impact of war memories on international relations and analyze the "monumental politics" of war memorials.