Serhii Plokhy

Plokhy was born to a Ukrainian family in Russia.⁠[1]

He spent much of his early life in Ukraine and earned an undergraduate degree in history and social sciences in 1980 at Dnipropetrovsk University (now Oles Honchar Dnipro National University), where he later became a professor.⁠[2]

There he developed as a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ukrainian history; on a later visit he recalled his mentors Hanna Shvydko and Mykola Kovalsky, founder of the Dnipro School of Source Studies.⁠[3]

He received an M.A. in history from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in 1982 and a Ph.D. in history from Kiev University in 1990.⁠[4]

In 2001 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 his The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, which examines the confessionalization of religious life in early modern Ukraine and shows how Cossack involvement in the struggle between Orthodoxy and Catholicism helped shape cultural identities in Ukraine, Russia and Poland.⁠[5]

On September 7, 2006, Cambridge University Press published The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, which traces pre-modern group identities among the Eastern Slavs from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ in the tenth century to Peter I and his eighteenth-century successors, and challenges attempts to nationalize the Rus’ past on behalf of existing national projects.⁠[6]

In March 2007 Harvard announced his appointment as Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1.⁠[4]

Before that he taught and conducted research at the University of Alberta in Canada, where he served as associate director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research and founded the research program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.⁠[2]

His Yalta: The Price of Peace was published on February 4, 2010. A review said he used Soviet sources to argue, revising the usual view in Cold War literature, that the 1945 Yalta conference was anything but a diplomatic defeat for the West.⁠[7][8]

In 2013 he became director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI).⁠[9]

He said that under his leadership HURI launched MAPA, the first digital humanities project in Ukrainian studies, an interactive digital atlas of modules with downloadable data, starting with the Holodomor and later adding a module on the social impact of the Chernobyl accident.⁠[3]

In 2014 Basic Books published his The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. Reviewer Stephen M. Norris wrote that the book focuses on July to December 1991, places Ukraine and other republics at the center of the drama, and challenges the triumphalist interpretation of the Soviet collapse as an American victory in the Cold War.⁠[10]

In 2015 Basic Books published his single-volume history of Ukraine, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, at 432 pages.⁠[11]

A review noted that the book covers some 2,000 years of Ukrainian history and that in the epilogue he places Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk within a centuries-old narrative of the two countries’ relations.⁠[12]

On March 30, 2015, The Last Empire was named winner of the 25th Lionel Gelber Prize, chosen from a shortlist of five; the prize carries $15,000. His Yalta had been a finalist for the 2011 prize.⁠[13]

The release also noted that he had received the Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award and the Historia Nova Book Prize for The Cossack Myth, and had recently been named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.⁠[13]

On December 6, 2016, Basic Books published The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story, about KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky, who in the late 1950s used a poison-spraying gun to assassinate Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera in West Germany, and his trial after he defected in 1961.⁠[14][15]

On October 10, 2017, Basic Books published Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, which traces in 20 chapters more than six centuries of Russian nationalism and imperialism, from Ivan III’s claim to rule all Rus’ to the post-Soviet resurgence of nationalism.⁠[16][17]

In February 2018 he won Ukraine’s Shevchenko National Prize for The Gates of Europe in the category of literature, non-fiction and journalism; established in 1961, it is among the country’s highest state awards, and that year fiction and non-fiction prizes were awarded separately for the first time.⁠[18]

On May 15, 2018, Basic Books released the US ebook of his Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, an account of the 1986 explosion and fire at the Chernobyl plant and of Soviet officials’ attempts to deny and then downplay it; the review noted that he shares the view of many historians that the meltdown was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.⁠[19][20]

On November 14, 2018, the book won the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction; judge Fiammetta Rocco said it is about political cynicism, scientific ignorance and the importance of holding people to account, calling it “an incredibly moral book.”⁠[21]

In 2019, under his leadership, HURI established the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, which became central to the institute’s academic response after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.⁠[1]

He also published Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front (2019) and the essay collection The Frontline (2021).⁠[9]

On April 13, 2021, W. W. Norton published Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which focuses on the misjudgments and misunderstandings that nearly led to nuclear war in 1962; the review called it a balanced and richly detailed look at both sides.⁠[22][23]

On May 17, 2022, Norton published Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters, which examines six nuclear disasters from the 1954 Castle Bravo test to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, arguing that any consideration of nuclear energy’s role in combating climate change must take account of the industry’s history of disasters.⁠[24][25]

In 2023 he published The Russo-Ukrainian War.⁠[9]

A review of The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History summarized the book as arguing that imperial nostalgia and miscalculation precipitated the war; its first half surveys the historical background of the 2022 Russian invasion and its second half recounts the conflict, with particular attention to the failed Minsk accords on the Donbas.⁠[26]

He appeared on episode 415 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 description calls him a Ukrainian historian at Harvard University and director of its Ukrainian Research Institute; topics included the collapse of the Soviet Union, the origins of Russia and Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalism, Stepan Bandera, the KGB, the war in Ukraine, NATO and Russia, peace talks, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Holodomor, Chernobyl and nuclear power.⁠[27]

On September 17, 2024, Allen Lane published his Chernobyl Roulette in trade paperback, at 240 pages.⁠[28]

Reviewer Kate Tsurkan described the book as a chronicle of the 35-day occupation of the Chornobyl nuclear plant at the start of the full-scale invasion and of the experiences of the nearly 300 Ukrainian firefighters, operators and National Guard members stationed there.⁠[29]

On June 25, 2025, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at the University of Oxford’s Encaenia ceremony.⁠[30]

On June 30, 2025, HURI announced that he was stepping down as director after 12 years, to be succeeded by Soviet historian Terry Martin.⁠[1]

On October 21, 2025, W. W. Norton published his 432-page The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival, which explores why governments have acquired and stockpiled nuclear weapons and the failure to reach meaningful nuclear arms treaties.⁠[31]

Allen Lane plans to publish his new book Killing the Pope: John Paul II and the Last Battle of the Cold War on February 23, 2027; drawing on new archival research, it revisits the May 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.⁠[32]

X: Public account: https://x.com/splokhy (opens in a new window)⁠[27]

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: Official website: https://huri.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[27]