This lecture tells the story of the survival strategy of a prince in an Anglo-American academic community of Russianists obsessed by the Russian Revolution and dominated by socialists and liberals. It is about adventures in the Soviet archives, but more seriously, it is about the impact of the Cold War on the way that Russian history was studied and taught in the West.
Linking autobiography and Cold War politics, this lecture explains why and how a historian worked for 31 years in LSE’s Political Science (Government) Department before transferring to be head of the Department of International History and then departing for the last decade of his career as a research professor in Cambridge, a post that is as close to Heaven as any British historian gets without actually dying.
The lecture discusses the impact of decades in a politics department on a historian. One accidental side-effect was spending the last eight years of the Cold War on Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy advisory committee. Apart from loosing off the odd anecdote, Prof Lieven will explain how being a historian influenced his interpretation of the politics of late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Above all, the lecture discusses how his understanding of Russian history was influenced by his work as an international and comparative historian, and how being a Russianist coloured his understanding of empire.
About our speaker:
Dominic Lieven is a past Head of Department for the Department of International History at LSE. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of International History as well as Chair of the Paulsen Programme.
He holds various titles including Fellow of the British Academy, Honorary Academician Russian Academy of Science, Honorary Fellow and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Professor Dominic Lieven joined LSE in 1978, became a professor in 1993 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001. He graduated first in the class of 1973 in history from Cambridge University and was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard in 1973/4. Subsequently, he has been inter alia a Humboldt Fellow in Germany, and a visiting professor at Tokyo University and Harvard. He was a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor at LSE (1978-2011). Head of the Department of Government from 2001 to 2004 and Head of the Department of International History from 2009 to 2011). From there he was a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (2011-2019) and has been a Honorary Fellow from 2019.
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