Vladislav Zubok

Vladislav Martinovich Zubok (; born 16 April 1958) is a Russian academic and professor of international history at the London School of Economics and a Head of the Сold War Studies Programme in the Department of International History. Zubok is a specialist in the history of the Cold War and 20th century Russia, who wrote such books as A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev and Zhivago’s Children: the Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009).

Early life He was born and educated in Moscow. He received his undergraduate degree at Moscow State University in 1980, and his PhD at the Institute for the US and Canada in 1985.

Career

Zubok became a fellow at the National Security Archive, a non-government organization at the George Washington University from 1994 till 2001. He has been a visiting professor at Amherst College, Ohio University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan, and in 2004 he became a tenured professor at Temple University.

Zubok is a senior fellow of The Hertog Program in Grand Strategy at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

For his books he received the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Marshall Shulman Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

He has also received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Yeltsin Center and the Russkiy Mir Foundation.

He was a consultant on documentary series such as CNN's twenty-four part series Cold War first broadcast in 1998.

Selected publications Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, From Stalin to Khrushchev. Harvard University Press, 1996. , A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Zhivago's Children: the Last Russian Intelligentsia. Harvard University Press, 2009. , Masterpieces of History: A Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989. Central European University Press, 2010. (editor with Svetlana Savranskaia and Thomas Blanton) Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia. il Mulino, Bologna, 2011. (Editor with Tommaso Piffer). Дмитрий Лихачев. Жизнь и век. Вита-Нова, 2016. The idea of Russia: the life and work of Dmitry Likhachev, London; New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2017. , "The Making of a Russian Cold War Historian during the Last Years of the Soviet Union" (Nov. 2021) online, autobiography Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. Yale University Press, 2021. The World of the Cold War, 1945–1991. Pelican, 2025.