Adam Ulam was one of the world’s foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Harvard faculty from 1947 until his retirement in 1992. Over the years, he trained thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, including many who went on to high-level posts in academia, government, business, and the media. Among his students were Robert Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Ulam was affiliated with Harvard’s Russian Research Center (renamed the Davis Center for Russian Studies in 1997) for more than 50 years. He twice served as the Center’s director, from 1973 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1992. During his tenure, the Center became one of the leading institutions in the world for the study of the Soviet Union.
Ulam was born on April 8, 1922, in what was then Lwów, Poland, now part of Ukraine. He emigrated to the United States in 1939, accompanied by his older brother, Stanislaw. The two brothers made it out of the country just two weeks before Germany attacked Poland. Ulam wrote 18 books, many of which remain classics in the field. After that, Ulam began writing about Russia and the Soviet Union, a focus he maintained for the rest of his life.
His study The Bolsheviks (1965) is still regarded as one of the definitive treatments of the Communist Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The book was hailed by reviewers as “an intellectual biography of the highest sort,” a “stunningly insightful look at this key period,” and a “masterful study of the Communists’ rise to power in Russia.” Ulam’s 760-page biography of Josef Stalin, Stalin: The Man and His Era, met similar acclaim when it was published in 1973. Reviewers described it as a “mammoth and altogether splendid volume,” “an absorbing study of power won and terrifyingly applied,” a “superb biography of Stalin,” and a book that is “morally as well as historically definitive.”
Ulam’s magisterial survey of Soviet foreign policy, Expansion and Coexistence, published in 1967, is often regarded as the most influential book on the subject ever to appear. Ulam wrote a sequel to it, Dangerous Relations, in the early 1980s. The two books together cover Soviet foreign policy to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. Ulam never published a booklength study of Gorbachev’s foreign policy, but he did cover the subject in his final book, The Communists (1992).
Ulam won many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956, Rockefeller Fellowships in 1957 and 1960, and a lifetime distinguished achievement award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1987.
Dr. Ulam was impressed with the Eurasia Center and its Eurasia Report and wished to be an Honorary Board Member of the Eurasia Center and support the Center in whichever way he could.