Adam Ulam Dies (original) (raw)

Adam B. Ulam, 77, a leading authority on Russia and the former Soviet Union and professor emeritus of history and political science at Harvard, died of cancer March 28 in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Ulam was a member of the Harvard faculty for 45 years and twice served as director of Harvard's Russian Research Center, which under his leadership became one of the world's leading institutions for the study of the Soviet Union.

He wrote 18 books, including a 760-page biography of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. "The Bolsheviks," published in 1965, is considered one of the definitive treatments of the party that seized power in Russia in 1917 and of its leader Vladimir Lenin.

From 1947 until he retired from the Harvard faculty in 1992, Dr. Ulam trained thousands of students, including many who achieved high-level positions in government, academia and the media. Those included former attorney general and New York senator Robert F. Kennedy and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

Adam Bruno Ulam was born April 8, 1922, in what was then Lwow, Poland, which is now part of Ukraine. He immigrated to the United States in 1939, accompanied by his older brother, Stanislaw.

The two of them made it out of the country just two weeks before Germany attacked. Stanislaw was among the most eminent mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century, and he played a crucial role in the development of the thermonuclear bomb. Adam, by contrast, never had any interest in mathematics, but achieved comparable stature in the field of Soviet studies.

Despite a 13-year age difference between the two brothers, they maintained an exceptionally close relationship until Stanislaw's death in 1984.

Adam Ulam graduated from Brown University and received his doctorate from Harvard in 1947. He became a U.S. citizen in 1949.

He published his first book in 1951, "The Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism," and followed it a year later with "Titoism and the Cominform." After that he focused exclusively on Russia and the Soviet Union.

In 1967, he published "Expansion and Coexistence," which is said to have been one of the most influential studies of Soviet foreign policy ever written. A sequel, "Dangerous Relations," was published in the early 1980s.

His honors included a lifetime distinguished achievement award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1987 and an honorary doctorate from Brown University in 1983.

His marriage to Mary Burgwin Ulam ended in divorce.

Survivors include two sons.