Kennan Institute

Occasional Paper #282 Remembering Adam Ulam

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Remembering Adam Ulam Angela Stent, Georgetown University 1

Adam Ulam as Historian Abbott Gleason, 3

Adam Ulam as Writer Nina Tumarkin, 5

Adam Ulam as Foreign Policy Analyst Angela Stent, Georgetown University 8

2 REMEMBERING ADAM ULAM

Introduction Stalin and his magisterial study of Soviet Adam Ulam was a towering figure foreign policy, Expansion and Coexistence in Russian and Soviet Studies, both are still among the best available. He literally and figuratively. He inspired also wrote books on British socialism, generations of students at Harvard and on Tito, and on what he viewed as the scholars around the world to pursue the disastrous impact of the ferment of the study of what was, for many, an intrigu- 1960’s on American academia. At the ing, exotic, and often frustrating topic of time of his death on 28 March 2000, he academic endeavor. He entertained was working on his autobiography. generations of scholars at the Harvard At the Kennan symposium, we had Russian Research Center during their two panels. The first panel discussed morning coffee hour with erudite Adam’s role as historian and featured historical stories, be they about the talks by Professors Abbott Gleason of British empire, Russian poetry, Soviet Brown University, whose paper is skullduggery—or, his favorite, the reproduced here, Professor Nina Boston Red Sox. After his death, a Tumarkin of Wellesley College, whose group of his former students gathered paper is also reproduced, Sanford together at the Kennan Institute to Lieberman of the University of Massa- honor him by speaking about a range of chusetts, and Dr. Mark Kramer of subjects that he had encouraged them Harvard University. The second panel to pursue. Three of them are presented focused on Adam’s work on foreign in this occasional paper. policy and featured Dr. Carol Saivetz of Adam belonged to that great Harvard, Dr. Steven Sestanovich, former generation of Soviet scholars who Ambassador-at-Large for the Newly shaped the debate about communism Independent States, David Kramer, of and Soviet intentions for the entire the State Department’s Office of Global period. Like many of the Affairs, and myself. Our talks mixed the founding fathers of this discipline, he scholarly with the personal. Adam came to the as a refugee inspired his students with such respect in the late 1930’s. Born on 8 April 1922 and affection that no scholarly presenta- in Lvov, then part of Poland, to an tion would have been complete without educated and prosperous family, he anecdotes about the milieu in which escaped Poland with his older brother Adam and his students operated. He was and outstanding mathematician an egalitarian professor who respected Stanislaus, literally at the last moment— students and colleagues alike and judged two weeks before the Nazis attacked. them by their intelligence and wit, not He completed his undergraduate degree by their status in the academic hierar- at Brown University and his Ph.D. at chy, Harvard. He joined the Harvard Faculty As Adam’s former students, we are in 1947 and went on to a distinguished grateful to the Kennan Institute and to academic career that included 18 books, its Director, Blair Ruble, for enabling us many of which remain classics in the to hold this symposium, and we encour- field. His biographies of Lenin and age you to read and reread Adam’s

3 seminal works on Russia and the Soviet Union. They will enlighten you with the wisdom, imagination, and erudition of a cosmopolitan, cultured European scholar, for whom intellectual integrity, not transient academic fashion, was the basis of the life of the mind.

Angela Stent Georgetown University

4 ADAM ULAM AS HISTORIAN Abbott Gleason, Brown University

Adam Ulam never lost his appetite a universe in which the sources came to for his subject. He was a man extraordi- him, rather than his having to go to narily well matched with the circum- them. Travel in the physical world made stances of his academic career. I used to him nervous, whereas the opposite was imagine at times that he saw the Cold true for the world as it was found in War as what amounted to a vast multi- books. And for that, his situation five dimensional board game, with both minutes walk from Widener Library was geographic and temporal dimensions. ideal. Not that Adam went to the library He played this game with verve, gusto, very often; emissaries brought what he and absorption for almost fifty years, wanted to his desk. This mirrored a utilizing his extraordinary memory and process in which Adam did not go out his flare for systemic analysis, which it to the world; he sucked it in and filtered seemed to me must have some kind of it through his powerful and systematiz- genetic relationship with his brother ing intellect, of Hegelian scope but Stan’s remarkable mathematical abilities. Bismarckian in its view of power and Adam also had something in human folly. common with Mycroft Holmes, famous Adam liked the idea that he only again recently as “Sherlock Holmes’ worked a measured and regular portion smarter brother.” Only instead of of each day, filling the rest of his time ensconcing himself at the Diogenes with games and social life. To some Club in London, it was Harvard’s extent this aristocratic self-conception Russian Research Center (now the was true. He was a genuine hedonist Davis Center) at 1737 Cambridge and needed companionship on a regular Street to which Adam repaired almost basis, but one way or another he was daily for those five decades. Student playing his gigantic board game most of research assistants would bring him piles the time, even as he read himself to and piles of books and periodicals and sleep at night. he would pillage them for his East-West Turning more narrowly to his board game. He was utterly dependent work, Adam Ulam had little interest in on his office, and almost as much so on historiography, although he had a great his daily colloquies with his colleagues love of . He took no interest at all over coffee. in what the dominant paradigms were, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told us in what work “needed to be done” or that the sedentary Mycroft would have anything like that. Self-conscious excelled his younger brother had he employment of “theory” was anathema. only had the energy to examine the He knew what interested him, he was muddy footprints on the field or the convinced he knew what was impor- Trichinopoly cigar ash on the carpet at tant, he had a sense of what would the murder scene the way Sherlock did. interest the public, and he wrote about Here the parallel with Ulam becomes those things. So his work cannot easily more complex. Ulam was neither portly be correlated to the methodological nor physically inactive, but his abilities preoccupations of scholars, then or and temperament were ideally suited to (especially) now. He often used the term

5 “totalitarianism” but was wholly indif- resigned for so long that they scarcely ferent to the quarrels between those think of it any more. All his books were who had rejected the term and those in his own voice; all of them relied on who defended it. To his gifts as a sys- what are today disparagingly known as temic thinker he added those of a keen “master narratives.” One can hardly and sardonic student of the human imagine it being any other way. comedy, a connoisseur of human expe- But this success had a certain price. rience, from the revealing anecdote to He created no school and in a certain the full-dress biography. He was also an sense broke no new intellectual ground, inveterate reader of spy and detective found no new subject matter for his- stories and of nineteenth-century torical treatment. I would venture to say European fiction more generally. No that although he had many admirers, he one not well versed in nineteenth- had no real disciples—what would it century novels could have written The mean to be a disciple of Adam Ulam? , and yet it was not self- How would one do it? He found no consciously novelistic. trove of new information in archives or Adam directed his books to the elsewhere. It was his peculiar combina- educated general reader, rather than to tion of gifts that marked his work, his his scholarly peers, who were often personality and sensibility, but also his exasperated by his hit-or-miss footnot- ability to create a tapestry coherent both ing, his refusal to “keep up”, and his aesthetically and intellectually at the lack of interest in regnant paradigms. He same time. It was his voice: the voice of was an individualist in these as well as in a European storyteller, loving a joke other matters and he seems never to (but generally at the right time), intoler- have lost his extraordinary intellectual ant of cant or even much earnestness, self-confidence. Looking back on his aristocratic in its acceptance of the career, one is struck by the sheer chutz- world of power as it was, but not with- pah of what he attempted (and largely out pity. This voice could first be heard accomplished): a study of the Tito-Stalin in its maturity in The Bolsheviks, which break in 1948, biographies of Lenin and will remain around for a long time, Stalin, an attempt to narrate half a because it is such a good read, even as century of Soviet foreign policy in three we know more and more about Lenin’s volumes, a book on the appeal of life, as we have already begun to do. to industrializing states in the Expansion and Coexistence, a really grand non-Western world, the Kirov novel . . ., and magisterial synthesis, has already not to speak of all those shorter pieces. been somewhat dated by recently All of this worked for him in his published archival information, and it time. His books were translated into has slightly less of Adam’s charm to keep many European and Asian languages, us interested. But it too will endure partly because they succeeded almost as until someone has the sheer courage to well as popular history as they did as undertake something comparable by academic history. He never accepted the way of a synthesis, or perhaps until loss of a popular audience, to which people have abandoned the aspiration to most academic historians have been do work on this scale.

6 ADAM ULAM AS WRITER Nina Tumarkin, Harvard University

Some twenty years ago, when I evidence, or even how to read and was in the throes of writing my first interpret it. But he helped to turn me book, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in into a writer of history and biography. Soviet Russia—the book that I later According to what assumptions, rules, dedicated to Adam—I always kept on and aesthetic imperatives would I take my bedside table two books, some pages my pen (I wrote Lenin Lives! with a of which I would read and reread fountain pen!) and word by word, nightly before going to sleep. They cigarette by cigarette, create a narrative, were: A Collection of Essays by George an argument, a page, a chapter, a book? Orwell, and Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks. My understanding of this fundamental At the time I had no idea, really, how to (and at the time, terrifying) process was craft a book and hoped that these in part derived from reading and reread- exemplary models would provide both ing The Bolsheviks. Here is some of what inspiration and guidance. I found and took from that book, Orwell I chose because I then influencing all my professional work— considered (and still do consider) his both my writing and my teaching: essays the finest examples of expository • An almost Tolstoyan devotion to writing in the English language. And the details of the human condition, why Adam Ulam’s biography of Lenin? with Tolstoy’s propensity to unpack As delightful as Adam’s prose could be and expose the ego and bravado of at its sparkly best, with its witticisms, those who aspired to power, and whimsical phrases, and footnotes con- those who achieved it. sisting of asides, anecdotes, and Mishnaic • A fascination with power and its commentaries, I sought and found in soft underbelly. In approaching the The Bolsheviks a different kind of inspi- Soviet system—which, in the ration and influence: its author’s philo- period of much of his best writing, sophical approach toward writing was still thought of as mono- history and biography. I was determined lithic—Adam was not affected by to understand the operating principles the mysterium tremendum et fascinans according to which Adam wrote about (theologian Rudolf Otto’s phrase the men who would shape the Soviet about the Holy, meaning, “that experience—but especially about Lenin, which makes one tremble and be whose interpretive biography I myself fascinated.”) Rather, he was like was writing for inclusion in my book Toto, the little dog in The Wizard of on the Lenin cult. I thus had the expe- Oz, who pulled back the curtain rience of reading many of the same behind “Oz, the Great and Ter- sources that Adam had used in his rible,” to reveal a frantic elderly book—plus a good many others—and man manipulating a creaky ma- then reconstructing some of his con- chinery of deception. ceptual and logistical premises and steps. • An appreciation of human Adam helped form me fundamen- agency and human foibles. To tally, not as an historian—not in show- Adam, the Soviet system was never ing me how to find and select my a machine or a complex of institu-

7 tions. Such an approach would this freedom was informed by a have been laughable, especially in richness of factual material and The Bolsheviks, which described the restrained by a sagacious judgment. early period of Soviet history. But It was the freedom that Adam took in Adam’s other works that de- to write it down just as he chose scribed the later decades of Soviet to—with associative thoughts and history, he also shied away from musings, and acrobatic turns of things institutional. Indeed, I think phrase. Adam’s authorial freedom that for Adam there was no Soviet was a key component in the system, but rather a collection of authoritativeness of his demon- knowable and comprehensible (to strated mastery of his material. an extent) actions taken by strang- • An expertise in the craft of what ers in a strange land, a way of I call “interrogative biography.” being in the world, pieced to- Adam liberally posed question after gether, often ad hoc, by particular question, both of his subjects, and men (and, rarely, women) born to by them, as though he were in particular parents in certain geo- their heads. Peruse Adam’s books graphical and historical settings. and you will see many question • An understanding that human marks, a reflection of how we all beings operate simultaneously in approach the puzzlement of the present, past, and future. Take a quotidien life. The mind does not look at the first chapter of The usually process the world in de- Bolsheviks in which he describes clarative sentences. Adam’s bio- Lenin’s family and the milieu of graphical work proceeds according provincial Russia in the last quarter to the same kind of dialogic of the nineteenth century, and you imperative that I believe character- will see that Adam moves back and izes human thinking. forth in time, opining about how * * * this or that aspect of the Ulianov In the last chapters of Lenin Lives!, world would influence Lenin later and in my second book, The Living and in life. Such an approach to writing the Dead, about the cult and memory of may seem obvious, since we all World War II in Russia, I sought to every moment act out according to exercise a measure of the writer’s past imperatives and create (often freedom that I had breathed in from The to our own detriment) the messes Bolsheviks. Some of my writing re- of our own lives and the lives of sembled Adam’s, for example, in its use others. But historians and biogra- of question marks and the associative phers are often timid about putting phrases and asides. And some did not, this fundamental ontological truth such as the personal and autobiographi- about people into the practice of cal voice I assumed in The Living and the their writing, opting instead to Dead. But Adam had given me the carefully (and two-dimensionally) courage and inspiration to make my put one foot in front of the other. writing my own, to go beyond the • An easy and almost breezy limits of traditional genres and look for freedom of expression. At its best, new ones. 8 Now that I have embarked on a my new book, which will be an inter- new venture that I began after Adam rogative biography. I will query my had become very ill—a study of four subjects, and also try to imagine the Russian Jewish intelligenty who left the questions they might have posed as they Empire before or during the 1917 made their way through the world. Revolution—I am sad to not be able to I am ever grateful to Adam Ulam talk to him about it (if only to share for many things, and he is, as Soviet amusing facts or insights). But Adam’s propaganists used to say about Lenin, hand and voice will nonetheless inform vsegda s nami, always with us.

9 ADAM ULAM AS FOREIGN POLICY ANALYST Angela Stent, Georgetown University

Adam Ulam’s legacy is rich and more likely to remain poised between multifaceted, but perhaps his most Europe and Asia, seeking an elusive important contribution for those of us Eurasian identity and place in the who write about foreign policy is how world? he inspired us to think about Russia and Russia’s ambivalent identity and the world outside. He taught his stu- contradictory attitude toward its dents the best methodology—common geostrategic role, argued Adam, was a sense. Adam’s reply to behavioral politi- product of both history and ideology. cal scientists who sought to quantify Adam was not a historical determinist, foreign relations was to show that the and did not believe that Russia was only way to understand the Soviet incapable of becoming integrated into leadership’s motivations and actions was Europe because it had not experienced to put oneself in its shoes, to speculate the Renaissance, Reformation, or creatively about how members of the Enlightenment. Indeed. Russia’s pre- Politburo might have approached the Revolutionary ruling elite was thor- challenges they faced, to imagine that oughly europeanized. Nevertheless, one was Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Russia’s expansionist policies in the or Gromyko. The opening up of Soviet eighteenth and nineteenth centuries archives since the collapse of commu- made Russia a Eurasian power in a nism has shown that most of Adam’s military sense and its rulers made conclusions about Soviet motivations choices that delayed its modernization. and actions that he discussed in Expan- After the revolution, Soviet ideology, sion and Coexistence or The Rivals were with its dialectical world view that both perceptive and accurate, even outlived the belief in Marxist-Leninist though he had no access to any archives. tenets, created generations of apparatchiki He instinctively understood Soviet who viewed the West with a mixture of foreign policy behavior and his writings suspicion, superiority, and inferiority, on these issues will outlive those more and rejected the idea of integration ephemeral “scientific” contributions to with the West. the discipline. Much of Adam’s best work dealt The issue of Russia’s perception of with the first generation of Soviet its place and role in the Eurasian land leaders, most of whom—with the mass was one with which Adam dealt at important exception of Josef Stalin— length in his writings and which re- had direct experience in Europe and mains a key question as we debate understood its culture and norms, even Russia’s role in the twenty-first century. if they rejected them. Stalin, of course, To what extent is Russia capable of was the ultimate Eurasian and he becoming a European power, in the eliminated most of the remaining sense that this concept is understood Bolsheviks who had any affinity for today? In other words, what do Adam’s European norms. Thus, for the last half writings teach us about Russia’s ability of the twentieth-century, the USSR was to become more fully integrated into ruled by men who were inculcated with Euro-Atlantic structures, or is Russia a Soviet-Eurasian world view. Many of

10 Russia’s current leaders still subscribe to country can be part of the global this view of Russia’s identity. economy without internalizing the The postwar Soviet Union was a values and norms of Euro-Atlantic European power in a military-geographic societies. sense. Its empire reached to the Elbe One major barrier to Russia river. Nevertheless, it was not a Euro- becoming a European power is the pean power in a political-cultural sense, state’s failure, so far, to comes to terms because it rejected those institutions and with the Soviet past, to engage in what values that we define today as “Euro- the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewael- pean”—democracy, transparent markets, tigung, confronting and overcoming rule of law, active civil society, respect one’s past. With the exception of a few for human rights, tolerance of different groups such as Memorial, there has been religions and ethnic origins, political no concerted effort on the pluralism. A European power in con- government’s part to confront what temporary definition practices coexist- Stalinism was, why it developed, and ence, not expansion, in its foreign policy. what should be done to prevent the Gorbachev’s perestroika and commit- Russian people from having to endure ment to a “common European home” similar horrors again. Examining and represented the beginning of a move accepting responsibility for the past is an away from Soviet norms toward Euro- integral part of what is needed for pean norms, but Russia today still faces Russia to become a European power. a major challenge in deciding how far it Did Adam believe that geography seeks to become integrated with the and history were destiny? Is Russia West and devising strategies for pursu- predestined to remain outside the Euro- ing that integration. Atlantic mainstream? Despite Adam’s Since Adam wrote his foreign emphasis on historical continuity, he policy books, there have been significant also understood that society was not domestic changes in Russia that could static and that change was possible both facilitate Russia’s greater integration in domestic and foreign policy behavior. with the West. Soviet ideology is dead, Russia could one day become a Euro- yet the dialectical approach to foreign pean power, but it would have to policy that Adam described has not yet undergo a major transformation, includ- disappeared. As new forms of national- ing dealing fully with its imperial and ism replace the old ideology and rein- communist legacies and developing a force Russia’s desire to be accepted as a post-imperial foreign policy concept. great power, Russians continue to The concept would stress coexistence debate their identity and interests, but rather than expansion and would be a suspicion of western motives remains. product of a genuine willingness to live On the other hand, Russia’s adoption of with its partners as a European power a market system—albeit an imperfect with limited ambitions. Russia would one—and its integration into the global have to learn to be a good neighbor. capitalist system represents a major If Russia does not undergo this break with its previous isolation from transformation in the next decades, then the global economy. Nevertheless, a it could become a weak Eurasian power.

11 It would draw closer to some parts of predictability that defines this era in the former Soviet Union and focus on Russia.” That quote will remain valid its relations with China, India, and other for the foreseeable future. It is the Asian and Middle Eastern nations. It scholarly community’s loss that we will could still retain institutional links to not have Adam to guide us with wis- Euro-Atlantic structures but would dom and humor through the maze that remain outside the West’s political and is contemporary Russia, with its unex- economic mainstream. pected endings and beginnings. In his last book, Understanding the Cold War, Adam wrote, “It is the lack of

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