Expertise: Military affairs, international relations theory, Cold War history, political, economic and cultural affairs in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Europe, comparative politics, labor and social policies, statistical analysis

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Senior Fellow

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.  He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; and three forthcoming books, Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary (to be published in 2008); The Collapse of the Soviet Union (to be published in 2008); and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality (to be published in 2009).  He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Professor Kramer also has written more than 150 articles on a variety of topics, including the Russian-Chechen wars, NATO and East European security, post-Communist economic reform in East-Central Europe, social policy in East-Central Europe, income distribution in East-Central Europe, civil-military relations in East-Central Europe, the global arms trade, utility deregulation in Russia, the Cuban missile crisis, the East German uprising of 1953, the1956 crises in Hungary and Poland, the Soviet-Czechoslovak crisis of 1968, the 1980-81 Polish crisis, Sino-Soviet relations, the Soviet and post-Soviet armed forces, the structures of Soviet and post-Soviet foreign policy-making, nuclear proliferation, and international relations theory.  His article “Ideology and the Cold War” in the October 1999 issue of the Review of International Studies was awarded a prize by the British International Studies Association for the best article published in the field of international relations in 1999.

Professor Kramer has worked extensively in newly opened archives in Russia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and several Western countries.  He has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Defense Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Agency for International Development, NATO’s Directorate on Science and Technology, the World Bank, and the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research.

Selected Research:

• "Ukraine's Orange Revolution," Current History, Mar 2008

Selected Commentary:

• "Questions Linger over Attempted Assassination of Polish Pope," Polskie Radio, May 2008
• "Welcome to Kosovo, the Next Failed State?" Washington Post, Mar 2008
• "How Far Will Russia Take Dispute With the West?" Wall Street Journal, July 2007