Norman Naimark

Naimark was born on June 19, 1944.⁠[1]

He was born in New York and was educated at Stanford University.⁠[2]

In an interview on July 26, 2013, he discussed his first visits to the region: Yugoslavia in 1964–1965 and Poland in 1968–1969.⁠[3]

He earned a BA (1966), MA (1968) and PhD (1972) in history from Stanford University.⁠[4]

His dissertation dealt with the 19th-century Polish party Wielki Proletariat (Great Proletariat), and he names Wayne Vucinich as his mentor.⁠[3]

Before returning to Stanford he was a professor of history at Boston University and a fellow of the Russian Research Center at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, and he held a visiting chair of Slavic studies at Wellesley College.⁠[5]

In 1979 Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry Press published his The History of the “Proletariat”: The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887, and in 1983 Harvard University Press published Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III.⁠[5]

In 1988 he returned to Stanford University as a professor in the History Department.⁠[6]

He directed Stanford’s Center for Russian and East European Studies from 1989 to 1995, chaired the History Department from 1995 to 1998, and served on the Faculty Senate and its Steering Committee from 2001 to 2004.⁠[2]

From 1992 to 1997 he chaired the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, and in 1997 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.⁠[7]

In 1995 Harvard University Press published his The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, with 577 pages of main text.⁠[8]

In 1995 he received the Stanford Alumni Association’s Richard W. Lyman Award for faculty volunteer service, and in 1996 the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.⁠[9]

In 2001 Harvard University Press published his Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, which examines five European cases: the Turkish removal of Armenians and Greeks during and after World War I, the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry, the Soviet relocation of the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean Tatars during World War II, the postwar expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.⁠[10]

The reviewer found little truly new material but judged the book a useful discussion of the distinctions between types of modern state-sponsored cruelty.⁠[10]

He co-edited Yugoslavia and its Historians (Stanford, 2003), the German and Russian document collection Soviet Politics in Austria, 1945–1955 (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2006) and The Lost Transcripts of the Politburo (YaleYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry, 2008).⁠[7]

In 2010 Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry Press published his Stalin’s Genocides. Reviewer Robert Legvold summarized that the book classifies dekulakization, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and the wartime deportation of nations each as a genocide, and defends extending the concept to the killing of political and social groups while acknowledging that this is controversial.⁠[11]

Naimark has said that social and political groups were included in the original drafts of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention but were excised primarily because of Soviet lobbying; he argues that Stalin magnified external threats and that communist-inspired genocide should be part of the understanding of mass murder.⁠[6]

In 2011 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, which he co-edited with Ronald Suny and Fatma Müge Göçek; its description presents it as Turkish, Armenian and other scholars working together for the first time to reconstruct what happened in the Armenian genocide and why.⁠[12]

Lennart Samuelson, reviewing the book in Baltic Worlds 3–4 (2012), argued that classifying the various Soviet atrocities together as genocide was oversimplified, and criticized the account of the Convention’s drafting for relying on secondary works rather than the original records and for omitting Cold War–era writers who had already called Stalin’s terror genocide.⁠[13]

In a 2013 review, Travis Gray found the chapter on dekulakization the most persuasive but judged the arguments that the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror were designed to eliminate particular groups less convincing.⁠[14]

In 2016 Oxford University Press published his Genocide: A World History, which examines the main episodes of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present.⁠[15]

On February 14, 2017, he recorded the Hoover Institution program Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, defining genocide as the intentional killing of a group as such, with examples including Carthage in 146 BC and the Yuki in 1850s California; he argued that when states fail to protect their citizens, the international community, after weighing the costs, has an obligation to intervene.⁠[4]

In 2018 Contemporary European History convened a roundtable on the Soviet famines in which he, Sarah Cameron, Arch Getty, Andrea Graziosi, Ronald Suny, Stephen Wheatcroft and others agreed to take part; its questions included the stakes of calling the 1930s famines genocide rather than mass death.⁠[16]

In 2019 he published Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty, arguing that in the immediate postwar years Stalin did not want an Iron Curtain to descend but pursued a more flexible, geostrategic approach to advancing Soviet interests; he said Stalin saw Europe “with the eyes of an ultra-realist” while remaining wary of a clash with the Americans and British on the continent.⁠[17]

In August 2020 the book received the Norris and Carol Hundley Award of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, after earlier appearing on the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry list of the best history books of 2019; he said the book grew out of a 2004 Journal of Modern European History article on Stalin and postwar Europe and was nearly two decades in the making.⁠[18]

On September 21, 2020, H-Diplo published a roundtable introduced by Ronald Grigor Suny, with reviews by Patryk Babiracki, Hope M. Harrison, Mark Kramer, Elidor Mëhilli and Marc Trachtenberg; Kramer suggested that a Bulgarian or Romanian case study would have altered the book’s conclusions about open outcomes. In his response Naimark said he was not so sure, suspecting that close study of those cases might have yielded results not very different from the Polish case.⁠[19]

On December 13, 2021, he appeared on episode 248 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose main topics included Stalin and absolute power, dictators and genocide, the definition of genocide, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea and China.⁠[20]

On April 11, 2022, the Freeman Spogli Institute released his conversation with Sean Patrick Hazlett, Through the Glass Darkly: Ukraine and the Question of Genocide, which asks what genocide is, whether the Soviet Holodomor of the 1930s and the atrocities in Bucha fit the definition, and whether the Russian military has shown a pattern in earlier conflicts.⁠[21]

With Ben Kiernan, Wendy Lower and Scott Straus he edited Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020.⁠[22]

Published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, the volume has 28 scholars documenting 30 genocides from 1918 to 2021; he co-wrote its introduction and wrote two chapters, on the Nazis’ treatment of Poles and Soviet prisoners of war and on genocide in Stalinist Russia and Ukraine, 1930–1938.⁠[23]

As of October 2026 he is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, emeritus, at Stanford University, having directed the Bing Overseas Studies Program and the Stanford Global Studies Division.⁠[9]

He is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, has been elected a foreign corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and serves on the academic board of the “Vertreibung” Museum in Berlin.⁠[15]

Boston University: Official website: https://www.bu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Hoover Institution: Official website: https://www.hoover.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]