Nina Tumarkin

Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies, Professor of History, and Director of Russian Area Studies, Wellesley College

CULTURE

She is also a longtime Associate of Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Her past career has included the role of adviser to President Reagan, for whom she wrote two invited papers and served as one of six “Soviet experts” who briefed the President, Vice-President, and key cabinet members shortly before Mr. Reagan’s historic first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit. President Bill Clinton read her book, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow in 1995. She is also the author of Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Her current book project explores the politics of the past in Putin’s Russia. At Wellesley College Professor Tumarkin teaches courses on the Soviet Union as well as Medieval and Imperial Russia, and courses on World War II as Memory and Myth, and on the Russian performing arts, plus a first year seminar on Vladimir Putin.