Crème de la Kremlin

From the NYT obituary for the Polish-born Adam B. Ulam (1922-2000), among America's most-admired scholars of the Soviet Union and director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard:

Dr. Ulam was known at Harvard as a man who did not take himself or his work all that seriously. When Nikita Khrushchev was unexpectedly purged in 1964, Dr. Ulam was asked why he hadn't predicted it.

''If it came as a surprise to Khrushchev, why wouldn't it come as a surprise to me?'' he replied.

Dr. Ulam dressed haphazardly, often wearing a jacket from a blue suit with pants from a brown suit to Harvard's Russian Research Center, where he was the director throughout most of the 1970's and 1980's.

Nearly every morning -- and he often worked seven days a week -- he went to the coffee room at the center at Harvard and visited with colleagues and students for an hour or so.

He loved coffee, and ignored rules about not smoking in his office.

He had a near photographic memory, and faculty and students at Harvard used to come to him rather than go to the library for details about the history of the Soviet Union.

From The Independent:

Although the Soviet archives were still closed, he combined an intuitive genius with prodigious reading of open sources to produce works that have held up remarkably well amid fresh archival revelations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. . . . Ulam's survey of Soviet foreign policy, Expansion and Coexistence, first published in 1967, is often regarded as the most influential book on the subject ever to appear. . . . Ulam's scholarly writing was notable not only for the depth of his insights, but also for his light touch and wit. A reviewer of his biography of Stalin described the author as "a sardonic conoisseur of human folly."

From reviews of Ulam's 1965 masterpiece The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia:

Notwithstanding the title [The Bolsheviks]... this is the most rewarding single study of Lenin that I have yet encountered.... The really impressive feature of Ulam's book is that he is thinking hard all the way. No comfortable historical generalization or biographical cliche escapes his critical attention, and he has a most satisfying way of asking, in effect--is this an adequate explanation; what else may be involved? In these days of rampant 'be-that-as-it-may' writing, Ulam's intellectual seriousness is a great relief and pleasure.
--Henry L. Roberts, The New York Times

This biography of Lenin...is so good that it is not merely superior in degree to any other life of Lenin, but different in kind. The conjunction of scholar and artist is the rarest thing. We used to be told that it was worth learning Italian to read Dante. Here is a new one: it is worth developing an interest in Lenin to read Adam Ulam.
--The Observer (London)

NOVEMBER 6, 2000

KREMLINOLOGIST AS HERO

by STEPHEN KOTKIN

Stephen Kotkin directs the Russian Studies program at Princeton

Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections by Adam B. Ulam. Leopolis, 448 pp.

Try to imagine the intellectual life of the post-war West without the Polish emigration. The Polish impact has been especially immense when it comes to views on Russia.

Czeslaw Milosz lectured at Berkeley with uncanny empathy on Dostoevsky. Leszek Kolakowski, the renowned moral philosopher at Oxford and Chicago, entombed Soviet Marxism as well as Western Marxism in his monumental trilogy, and composed an immortal parody of revisionist scholarship on Stalinism (for the pages of Survey, edited by Leo Labedz). Andrzej Walicki of Notre Dame struck brilliant portraits of Russian populism and the Slavophile-Westernizer divide, and then delivered his own eulogy for the Marxist faith.

And beyond the history of ideas, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand strategist and perceptive analyst of the Soviet Bloc, served as National Security Adviser (under Carter), while Richard Pipes, the grand synthesizer of imperial Russian history, also found his way into the National Security Council (under Reagan). The University of Pennsylvania's Moshe Lewin became the acclaimed village elder among historians of Soviet Russia's peasant inheritance, monstrous bureaucracy, and the supposed dynamics of the system's evolution. The itinerant Isaac Deutscher, based eventually in England, achieved biographical mastery over Stalin, ultimately cast out Trotsky as prophet, and talked up Khrushchev, until he was banished. And there have been many others, notably Adam Ulam, who died in March in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a half century of influential scholarship and punditry, and a posthumous memoir, Understanding the Cold War.

[For Continuation]