Taubman, William 1941-

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TAUBMAN, William 1941-

PERSONAL: Born November 13, 1941, in New York, NY; son of Howard (a critic for the New York Times) and Nora (Stern) Taubman; married Jane Andelman (an assistant professor of Russian), 1969; children: Alexander James. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1962; Columbia University, M.A. and Certificate of Russian Institute, 1965, Ph.D., 1969; attended Moscow State University, 1965-66.

ADDRESSES: Home—46 Orchard St., Amherst, MA. Office—Political Science Department, Amherst College, 104 Clark House, Amherst, MA 01002-5000. E-mail—wctaubman@amherst.edu.

CAREER: Amherst College, Amherst, MA, instructor, 1967-69, assistant professor, 1969-73, associate professor, beginning 1973, currently Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science.

MEMBER: American Political Science Association, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, American Association of University Professors, Council on Foreign Relations.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1962; Fulbright Hays fellowship, 1965-66; International Affairs fellowship, Council on Foreign Relations, 1970-71.

WRITINGS:

The View from Lenin Hills: Soviet Youth in Ferment, Coward, McCann (New York, NY), 1967.

Governing Soviet Cities: Bureaucratic Politics and Urban Development in the USSR, Praeger (New York, NY), 1973.

(Editor) Globalism and Its Cities: The American Foreign Policy Debate of the 1960's, Heath (Lexington, MA), 1973.

Stalin's American Policy, Norton, (New York, NY), 1982.

Moscow Spring, Summit Books (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor) Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1991.

(Editor, with Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason) Nikita Khrushchev, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000.

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: William Taubman has written extensively on the Soviet Union and, in particular, on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He is the editor of Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era, a memoir written by Khrushchev's son, Sergei, and editor with Sergei and Abbott Gleason of Nikita Khrushchev, a collection of essays based on previously unavailable information on the Soviet premier. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is Taubman's own full-length biography of the controversial leader of the former Soviet Union.

Taubman's year as an exchange student in the Soviet Union in 1965 is the subject of his first book, The View from Lenin Hills. Fred M. Hechinger of the New York Times found that "the Taubman view from Lenin Hills is clear, fresh and entertaining. The conclusion that many young Russians are not anticapitalist in the way many Americans are anti-Communist is shrewdly accurate and worth thinking about." In the same year he visited the Soviet Union, Taubman also served as one of the interpreters for the Soviet National Basketball Team on its American tour.

In Khrushchev on Khrushchev, the premier's son, Sergei, remembers his influential father's long career as a Soviet official, his eventual ouster in the 1960s, and the painful years of forced retirement. Khrushchev began as a henchman of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, played a role in the bloody purges of the 1930s, and oversaw a period of relative calm and stability before leading the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Genevieve Stuttaford in Publishers Weekly found the book to be "astute, wrenching, brimming with disclosures," although she believed that Sergei "attempts to rehabilitate his father."

In Nikita Khrushchev, Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason present newly released documents about the life and career of the former Soviet leader. After Khrushchev was declared a "non-person" by the Soviet government after his ouster as premier in 1964, information about his life and career was strictly controlled. Only when Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev allowed government archives to be opened to the public in the 1980s did details about Khrushchev's reign become available. These documents, along with Khrushchev's own memoirs and the memoirs of those who served under him, are drawn upon in the essays gathered in Nikita Khrushchev. Harry Willems of Library Journal noted that "this book fills a void in Soviet studies." "Overall," Christopher Read in History Today found, "the collection advances the study of the Khrushchev years very considerably, throwing light on almost all the key issues."

Taubman's 2003 title Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is a massive, 700-page biography of the Soviet premier and the first to be written by an American. Taubman argues that Khrushchev's paradoxical career—beginning as a murderous underling to Joseph Stalin but eventually becoming the premier himself and denouncing Stalin—can be seen "as a mirror of the entire Soviet experience," as Gilbert Taylor in Booklist noted. A critic for Publishers Weekly believed that "Taubman has pieced together a remarkably detailed chronicle, complete with riveting scenes of Kremlin intrigue and acute psychological analysis that further illuminates some of the nightmarish episodes of Soviet history." Similarly, Willems described Taubman's book as "a massive biography that is both psychologically and politically revealing." Taylor concluded that Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is an "outstandingly composed work, assuredly the reference point for future writings on Khrushchev."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Biography, summer, 2003, Leon Aron, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 539.

Booklist, November 1, 2002, Gilbert Taylor, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 472.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May, 1991, Richard Ned Lebow, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 43.

Current History, October, 1989, R. Scott Bomboy, review of Moscow Spring, p. 345.

Foreign Affairs, winter, 1990, John D. Campbell, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 198.

History Today, May, 2001, Christopher Read, review of Nikita Khrushchev, p. 55; January, 2004, Sergei Kudryashov, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 57.

Library Journal, March 1, 1982, review of Stalin's American Policy, p. 549; March 15, 1989, R. H. Johnston, review of Moscow Spring, p. 79; April 15, 2000, Harry Willems, review of Nikita Khrushchev, p. 100; October 15, 2002, Harry Willems, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 80.

Nation, May 26, 2003, Robert D. English, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 29.

New Leader, February 22, 1982, Robert Taylor, review of Stalin's American Policy, p. 18.

New Statesman and Society, August 10, 1990, Lawrence Freddman, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 33.

Newsweek, June 26, 1989, Carroll Bogert, review of Moscow Spring, p. 68.

New York Review of Books, December 19, 1991, David Remnick, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 72.

New York Times, January 22, 1968, Fred M. Hechinger, review of The View from Lenin Hills.

New York Times Book Review, January 17, 1982, Joseph S. Nye, review of Stalin's American Policy, p. 8; April 23, 1989, Abraham Brumberg, review of Moscow Spring, p. 15; July 29, 1990, George W. Breslauer, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 10.

Publishers Weekly, November 27, 1981, William Stuttaford, review of Stalin's American Policy, p. 78; February 10, 1989, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Moscow Spring, p. 59; April 13, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, p. 50; November 11, 2002, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 47.

Spectator, April 19, 2003, Simon Heffer, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 39.

Times Higher Education Supplement, December 5, 2003, Catherine Andreyev, review of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 31.