vision of judicial authority, one founded disagreed with them, unless the president grant alcoves. As the Nazis overran on a decent regard for the competing con- and Congress had violated constitutional France, began bombing Britain, and then stitutional views of tbe political branches. rights and limitations tbat were too clear drove deep into the Soviet Union, the This might be a vision of judicial humility to ignore. It is not surprising, perhaps, gaiety of fraternity life and the "America for an age of dissensus, anchored not in that the Court has managed to avoid a First" detachment of 1939-1941 was al- romantic respect for the wisdom of Con- political backlash against its bigb-hand- most too much to bear for a Polish student gress and the president but in respect for edness by keeping its finger to the political from occupied Europe. Finally Pearl Har- their constitutional prerogative to inter- winds. But have the political branches bor broke tbe isolationist spell. Ulam ob- pret the Constitution in ways that may become so cowed by the Court's grandiose tained immigration papers and reported differ from the Supreme Court. A defer- assertions of its own supremacy tbat they to the United States draft board, only to be ential Court would generally uphold tbe bave lost the will to stand up for them- rejected for having "relatives living in acts of tbe political branches, even when it selves? • enemy territory"! In 1943, upon graduat- ing, the taJl, strapping youth was sum- moned for a physical, but he was turned away again, this time for near-sighted- ness. Unlike other eager call-ups, he bad forgotten to wear contacts. Following bis elder brother (and surro- Kremlinologist as Hero gate father) to the University of Wiscon- sin, Adam got a job as an army instructor KOTKIN for Russian, the unfamiliar language of our wartime ally. Tbe other teachers in- Understanding the Cold War: cluded an ex-czarist general, a former baroness, and a Moscow-trained Polish A Historian s Personal Reflections violinist with whom Adam shared an byAdamB. Ulam apartment. The roommates befriended a retired professor of Bj-zantine history, (Leopolis, 448 pp., $30 paper) Alexander Vasiliev, who had known Tchai- kovsky in St. Petersburg, and in Madison RY TO IMAGINE the intellec- mately cast out Trotsky as prophet, and helped them to order spaghetti and meat- tual life of the post-war West talked up Khrushchev, until he was ban- balls in Italian. In such company, Adam without the Polish emigration. ished. Ajid there bave been many others, acquired a fondness for Russian culture The Polish impact has been notably Adam Ulam, who died in March rather than the more typical Russophobia especially immense when it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving be- of the emigre Pole born of centuries under Tcomes to views on Russia. Czeslaw Milosz hind a half century of influential scholar- the Russian boot. The anny privates and lectured at Berkeley with uncanny empa- ship and punditry, and a posthumous non-coms whom Ulam had taught to thy on Dostoevst^. Leszek Kolakowski, memoir. Understanding the Cold War. speak Russian were assigned to tbe Pacific the renowned moral philosopher at Ox- Adam Bruno Ulam was born in 1922 in Theater. ford and Chicago, entombed Soviet Marx- Lw(')w in Poland, a medieval town that was Stanislaw Ulam had disappeared (to ism as well as Westem Marxism in bis known as Lemberg under the Habsburgs New Mexico, it turned out, to work on monumental trilogy, and composed an and would become Lvov under the Sovi- the bomb), and after tbe long anticipated immortal parody of revisionist scholar- ets. Since 1991, the "City of Lions" bas victory Poland disappeared, too, behind ship on Stalinism (for the pages of 5w rvey, been Lviv in independent Ukraine. Little the Iron Curtain. Adam, meanwhile, bad edited by Leo Labedz). Andrzej Walicki of remains tbere of tbe classical education or enrolled in Harvard's Govemment De- Notre Dame stmck brilliant portraits of Old World culture tbat nurtured the partment for graduate study. Two of his Russian populism and the Slavophile- future Cold War historian. In 1939, Adam, teachers at Brown had studied at Harvard, Westernizer divide, and then delivered his who had just graduated high school, and and Ulam writes that they imparted "an own eulogy for the Marxist faitb. his twenty-nine-year-old brother Stanis- historical approach to modem politics And beyond tbe history of ideas, law, a young mathematician at Harvard's enlarged by philosophical analysis and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand strate- Society of Fellows, bome for summer holi- political and economic considerations"—a gist and perceptive analyst of the Soviet day, were scheduled to board ship for New description of what would become bis Bloc, served as National Security Adviser York on September 3. Their perspicacious own winning method, now quantifiably (under Carter), while Richard Pipes, the father, a well-to-do lawyer wbo was wid- out of fashion. He wrote a dissertation on grand synthesizer of imperial Russian his- owed the year before, advised his boys English socialism, and also studied with tory, also found his way into the National to set sail earlier. So the)' embarked for Merle Fainsod, the dean of Soviet ana- Security Council (under Reagan). Tbe New York in mid-August. Hitler invaded lysts, wbose twelve o'clock lectures in a University of Pennsylvania's Moshe Lewin Poland on September 1. Sixteen days later, basement classroom in the Fogg Museum became the acclaimed village elder among Stalin, by prior secret agreement with were aflectionately known as "Darkness historians of Soviet Russia's peasant in- Hitler, invaded Poland from tbe east. By at Noon." heritance, monstrous bureaucracy, and then, Stan had returned to Harvard, and At Ulam's first Harvard residence, the supposed dynamics of tbe system's Adam enrolled at Brown, tbe only enter- Claverly Hall, tbe janitor sported a derby evolution. The itinerant Isaac Deutschcr, ing foreign student, and a Jew. The broth- hat and pince-nez, and reminisced about based eventually in England, achieved ers never saw their father or elder sister fonner student residents, such as Franklin biographical mastery over Stalin, ulti- again. D. Roosevelt. Later Ulam swapped places Brown, where young Ulam studied with a young scholar named McGeorge STEPHEN KOTKIN directs tbe Russian European and American history, was not Bundy and moved to Eliot House. The Studies program at Princeton University. City College with its politicized, immi- housemaster at his new abode, John

THE NEW REPUBLIC : NOVEMBER 6, 2000 : 45 I H Finley, a professor of Greek, brought the nineteen books, one a novel. As he here itously arrived, heat the underground university's most renowned faculty to the recounts, he initially devoted himself to party into seizing power at all costs. What m mess hall and social gatherings, and knew examining Marxism's powers of seduc- Ulam called Lenin's "penchant for terror" hy name his entire student "flock," not just tion, which he linked not to intelligentsia he attributed to a "perverse hatred" that m the European counts and princes. Ulam manipulations but to psychological pro- the dropout law student felt toward "his boarded with the son of James Joyce, the clivities arising out of social developments, own class," the intelligentsia, and to the m grandson of Matisse, the younger son of especially in peasant societies undergoing hanging of his elder brother hy the czarist the Aga Khan, and a descendant of Indo- industrialization. And whereas some cele- police. Such occasionally strained psy- c nesian rajas who told him his family had brated analysts, such as John Maynard chologizing went together with skillfiil CO been in politics for 800 years. "And what Keynes, had dismissed Marxism as "illogi- recuperations of seemingly obscure ideo- did they do before?" Ulam recalls having cal and dull," Ulam highlighted the doc- logical disputations, alleged to have long- o asked. trine's intricacy and comprehensiveness, term repercussions, and sober details of In these mandarin alcoves of the new, which, he argued, explained its attraction political repression. American-dominated postwar world, not just to peasants but also to intellectu- The upshot, a powerful portrait of the Ulam, in J. Press suits and striped bow als. Ulam also wrote about the Soviet- Bolshevik leader and the Bolshevik move- ties, came to know officials of Chiang Kai- Yugoslav split in 1948, which just three ment written despite the inaccessibility of Shek's Nationalist regime, who had no many documents, burst on the scene after clue that they were soon to be overthrown, the de-Stalinization in 1956, the launch- as well as trainees for what would be- ing of Sputnik in 1957, and the Cuban come Mao's regime. Ulam also met Pierre revolution in I960, all of which had Trudeau, whom he recalls as an aristo- contributed to a sense that the Soviet cratic French-Canadian with "Christ- Union had not simply recovered from ian-anarchist" views, as well as the World War II but recaptured its revo- doctoral student in economics lutionary elan, and might just be Andreas Papandreou. Whatever the wave of the future. Here Ulain he did for Greece as prime minis- notes that the opening of the ter after the downfall of the secret archives has brought little colonels' dictatorship, Papan- that was truly unknovin about dreou is said to have been valu- Lenin, unless one counts the able company for obtaining proof of his consummation special treatment in Greek- with Inessa Armand. The dic- American restaurants, and tator's "all-engrossing passion for navigating Boston night- for revolution," he writes, had clubs. Ulam lets slip that in "seemed to preclude the pos- 1945, after the relaxation of sibility, perhaps the ability, to gender segregation on cam- respond to the temptation of pus, a romance blossomed in the flesh." Widener Library viith an Stalin had succeeded Lenin, unnamed Anglo-Irish repre- and in 1973 Ulam published sentative of the fair sex, leading his acclaimed biography, Stalin: to dog shows, horse races, and The Man and His Era. At the time the Boston symphony, but it all the book appeared, the extent of the "ended tempestuously." In 1947, he terror and the Gulag was being mini- received his doctorate and George mized by some leading American Marshall gave the commencement scholars, while even intellectuals with- address in which he announced his plan out leftist sympathies sometimes felt that for rebuilding Western Europe. accepting the fi.ill unvarnished truth about Harvard hired Ulam for the next acade- the Soviet Union smacked of bad taste, or mic year, and it set up a Russian Research even McCarthvism. Ulam piled up the sor- did details of Stahn's reign, and against the Center, which in the years to come became Adam Ulam the academic epicenter of the Cold War. post-Khrushchev interpretive trend, he Following Fainsod's death in 1972, Ulam years after the Chinese revolution, he pre- argued that the tyrant represented not a would direct the high-profile center for sented as a harbinger of the fracturing of perversion or a usurpation of Leninism sixteen of the next twenty years. But he communism. These two themes—Marx- but rather its "defining characteristic." To taught his first class, attended by the ism's spreading influence and its resulting his critics, who noted the utter absence of undergraduate Henry Kissinger, on the divisions—formed the core of Ulam's society in his great-man histories, Ulam British Empire. "Every few months, a work. countered, as he recalls that, "the most piece of my course would, so to speak, fall Having already ruffled some academic practical and important approach to the off," Ulam writes of postwar decoloniza- feathers by aptly describing the power study of the Soviet Union was through its tion. "I decided... to shift to an expanding struggle after Stalin's death in 1953 as akin politics, which in its turn had to be an ... subject, and to teach about the Soviet to gangland Chicago imder Capone, in inquiry into what was going on in the Union." Before he retired, in 1992, he 1965 Ulam published The Bolsheviks, the political leadership." Dubbed Sovietology would preside pedagogically over that most incisive study to date of Lenin and or sometimes Kremlinology, this endeavor empire's crack-up as well. his followers. Ulam's Lenin came across as at its best entailed voracious reading of official .sources, often between the lines, Ulam married a Radcliffe graduate, a cultured Russian gentleman and an heir frequent resort to the accounts of defec- Mary Hamilton Burgwin, in 1963 (they to a long revolutionarj' tradition, but also tors, and inventive guesswork. later divorced), had two sons, and wrote as a fanatic who, when the moment fortu-

46 : NOVEMBER 6, 2000 So much about the Stalin years seemed militant Communism was definitely over," cup of tea either. He never returned to to defy logic, sucb as the accusations of given tbe tbreats posed by the anti-Com- bis birthplace in what he playfrilly liked to mass spying and wrecking throughout tbe munist resistance in his native Poland and call "Ukrainian-occupied Poland," and he Soviet elite during tbe Great Terror. Ulam a "capitalist-road" China, Still, he observes avoided all travel to the Soviet Union, surmised that in the conspiratorial atmos- that he did not fathom the depth of Soviet wben it became possible after 1957, except phere of tbe 1930s, most people, mentally problems, and he did not predict tbe col- for one short trip in fall 1985, preferring to equipped witb little more than tbe official lapse. No one did. As other scholars pub- receive important contacts along with stu- ideology, probably believed tbe preposter- lish bighly selective collections of declassi- dents at the Russian Research Center ous charges that resulted in millions of fied Soviet documents, whicb supposedly (known since 1997 as tbe Davis Center). arrests. "Working on Stalin, as I suppose confirm tbeir long-beld views, Ulam, more Ulam's tidied-up reminiscences are inter- on Hitler," he confesses, "is not a pleasant right than most, had tbe courage to con- spersed with warm recollections from job. One cannot help becoming depressed cede tbat "I was ratber timid wben assess- his brother (wbo died in 1984), his ex- by recounting tbe stories of buman de- ing the chances for fiindamental changes," wife (tbe book's publisher), his sons, col- pravity and mass suffering." Ulam admits, and tbat on some major questions "I was leagues, former students, and old family however, having "found occasional dis- quite mistaken." friends. A zestful storyteller, Ulam favors traction in trying to solve tbe intriguing the winning anecdote and tbe wink and historical puzzles of the period " mysteries ERHAPS NO SUBJECT exercised nod over the tedium of score-settling. His "that would challenge the ingenuity of tbe lifelong student of European tales of clubby academic practices and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot." The P political systems and international upbeavals amid the Ivy alternate with archives, still not fiilly revealed, over- affairs more than the American univer- ponderous exegeses of ever-receding Cold whelmingly confirm Stalin's responsibility sity, whicb Ulam had known since his War controversies and brief mentions of for the massacres as well as tbe system's years at Brown. Writing of the 1960s, Viet- out of place characters, such as Heinricb inhumanity, witb copious new details; but nam, and the student protests, he recalls Briining, tbe German chancellor who gave the secret documents offer few new in- encountering on his way to class "morning way, eventually, to Hitler and also found a sights into Ulam's larger questions of tbe scenes of a sizeable crowd sometimes fill- home at Harvard. • bases of mass participation and the adher- ing the large space in front of tbe library ence to socialism despite knowledge or and an orator with a microphone de- even direct experience of the pervasive nouncing violently some special iniquity Thousands of titles to choose bloodletting. of the university and/or of the bourgeois from—Economics, Phiiosophy, world," He pronounces the issues (or some Ulam applied his feel for Communist Politics, and other Conservative of them) legitimate, but the methods not. personalities and paradoxes to the m>^ter- Non-Fiction. More ttian any other The smugness that "Harvard was not ies of international behavior of tbe Soviet unabridged publisher. Authors Columbia" ended with the takeover and Union as well. In such works as the instant such as WILL, KIRK, BUCKLEY the forcible clearing of the administration classic Expansion and Coexistence (1968, O'ROURKE, MISES, RAND, building. Ulam admonishes that "the uni- 1974), as well as The Rivals (1971) and SOWELL, ALDER, & MORE. Dangerous Relations (1983), he wondered versity in a democratic country is not tbe whether the Soviet leadership could proper place for political struggle," while For a Free Catalog with a $6.00 Off Coupon Inside write achieve a lasting detente with the West, or also judging the faculty's behavior at the or call; Dept NR • P.O. Box 969 • Ashland, OR 97520 required a permanent siege mentality for time as "un-heroic." domestic purposes—a potentially shatter- Lecturing to Harvard students on 1-800-729-2665 ing proposition in the nuclear age. Hawk- socialism and revolution, Ulam had to be www. blackstoneaudio. com ish specialist-officials sucb as Brzezinski dragged to the suddenly recurring fac- BLACKMONfc AUDIObOOK.V and Pipes largely dismissed any possibil- ulty meetings, which be likens to a "rowdy RECORDINGS THAT INSPIRE, EDUCATE, ENTERTAIN ity of lessening hair-trigger tensions, argu- Balkan parliament" of "scholarly men,.,. ing that the Soviet system could never largely without prior interest in politics, change, wbile some left-leaning scholars split up into combating factions." Of the The Bronfman Youth such as Deutscber and Lewin foresaw a phenomenal post-1960s growth in aca- Fellowships - a summer of relaxation both feeding and growing out demic administrators, he concludes sar- of a Soviet domestic liberalization. In- donically that "a great proliferation of Jewish study/travel in Israel clined neither to bring on doomsday nor bureaucracy follows every revolution, and for a pluralistic group of to pursue tbe cbimera of socialism with a Harvard was no exception," In 1972, Ulam students currently in 11th human face, Ulam hinted that tbe Soviet published The Fall of the American Uni- regime was beset by the contradictions of versity, in wbich be decried tbe "govem- grade; selected on merit, its expansionist successes, and might be- mentalization and politicization" of the not need. come more accommodating abroad even American academy, tbough he would con- For 2001 application: as it remained authoritarian at home. tinue to prosper at an American university That is more or less what happened, until for several more decades. He also became [email protected] or Gorbachev arrived to expose the incurable captivated by Russia's tumultuous 1860s 518-475-7212. ailments and unwittingly hastened the and 1870s, writing In the Name of the Peo- system's suicide. ple (1977) about the radical revolutionary mystique, the bomb throwing, and tbe "Who in 1971," Ulam muses, "could have IMAGINE YOURSELF believed that if tbe USSR went down it assassination plots. IMMORTALIZED IN THE POP would do so with barely a whimper?" Con- Cursed to live in interesting times, the ART STYLE OF THE cerning the Soviet invasion of Afghan- 6O'S &70'S,,. exile from bygone Lwow cajne to know vfww.ws servlcs.com/neo6O istan, which precipitated warnings of three American presidents, but mostly (630)955-2033 Soviet global domination, he claims that kept his distance from Washington. The y \ored servile "even in 1979-1980 I felt that tbe era of academic conference circuit was not bis Wkecreen on eanvae

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