Adam Bruno Ulam

Biography

Ulam was born on April 8, 1922 in Lwów (Lviv), then Poland now Ukraine. After graduating from high school, he emigrated to the United States on or around August 20, 1939, to go to college. This was but days before the German invasion of Poland which marked the beginning of the Second World War. His father had, at the last minute, changed his departure date from September 3 to August 20, most likely saving his life since Poland was invaded by Germany on September 1. His entire family, save for his brother Stanisław Ulam, a famous mathematician and key contributor to the Manhattan Project, would perish in The Holocaust. After the United States entered the war, he tried to enlist in the army, but was rejected at first for having "relatives living in enemy territory" and later, after a second attempt, for near-sightedness.

He studied at Brown University, taught shortly at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he studied from 1944 to 1947. He became a member of Harvard's faculty in 1947, was awarded tenure in 1954, and enjoyed the title of Gurney Professor of History and Political Science until he became professor emeritus in 1992. He directed the Russian Research Center (1973–1974) and was a research associate for the Center for International Studies, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953–1955). He married in 1963 and had two sons. He died from lung cancer on March 28, 2000, at the age of 77. [edit] Works

He was the author of twenty books and many articles, primarily on the Soviet Union and the Cold War (the major exception being Fall of the American University, a critique of U.S. higher education, written in 1972). He is considered one of the most eminent Kremlinologists.

In his first book - Titoism and the Cominform - published in 1952 and based on his Ph.D. thesis, he argued that the Communist focus on certain goals blinded them to the disastrous socioeconomic side effects which could weaken their hold on power.

His Unfinished Revolution (1960) was exploring Marxist thought. The Bolsheviks (1965) quickly became a standard biography of Lenin, and Stalin: The Man and His Era (1973) did the same for Stalin. The Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-67 (1968) was likely his most known work. There were two sequels: The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II (1971) and Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (1983).

Several of his remaining books were dedicated to aspects of Russian revolutionary thought. He also wrote a novel, The Kirov Affair (1988) on the Soviet 1930s. In one of his last books, published in 1992 — the year he retired — Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions, he commented on the fall of the Soviet Union, writing that communists lost because their ideology was misguided and realization of that by the governing elites led to their demoralization, which in turn fed the growing tensions and conflicts within and between Communist states.