Russian / Soviet History

Vladimir Brovkin

Russian-born American historian of Russia, formerly Associate Professor of Soviet History at Harvard and later an adjunct professor at American University. A former Wilson Center scholar, he writes on the Russian Revolution, the Civil War and the century from Lenin to Putin.

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Vladimir N. Brovkin is a Russian-born American historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1984, with a dissertation on Menshevik opposition to Bolshevik rule in 1917–19, and was Associate Professor of Soviet History at Harvard University in the 1990s, including as a John Olin Fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center. He later taught as an adjunct professor at American University. He was a Research Scholar at the Wilson Center (Kennan Institute) in 1989–90, with an earlier short-term stay in 1986.

His academic work concentrates on the Revolution, the Civil War and the 1920s: The Mensheviks After October (Cornell, 1987), Dear Comrades (Hoover Institution Press, 1991), Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton, 1994), and Russia After Lenin (Routledge, 1998). In 2023 Routledge published From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin: Russia in Search of Its Identity, 1913–2023, which traces cultural and political continuities across Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

He now publishes video and written commentary through his YouTube channel History and Politics With Dr. Brovkin and at vbrovkin51.substack.com, and appears as a guest on independent programmes, including Lena Petrova's World Affairs in Context.

Background

PhD, Princeton University (1984); former Associate Professor of Soviet History, Harvard University; former adjunct professor, American University; former Research Scholar, Wilson Center / Kennan Institute

Topics

Russian history Russian Revolution Soviet Union Russian foreign policy Ukraine conflict

Why included

A specialist historian of the Russian Revolution, Civil War and NEP whose books were published by Cornell, Princeton, Hoover Institution Press and Routledge. That archival training is the basis of his later commentary on contemporary Russia, which he now publishes on his own YouTube channel and Substack and as a frequent guest, including on World Affairs in Context.