About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to shed light on major events of recent history, such as the last “superpower summits” (between Gorbachev and Reagan, and later Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush), the miraculous revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, Yeltsin’s turn to authoritarianism in Russia in the 1990s together with the “market bolshevism” (Peter Reddaway’s phrase) of economic reform, what Gorbachev and Yeltsin heard from Americans and Europeans about NATO expansion, nuclear follies from Semipalatinsk to Pervomaysk, and the existential threats to humanity (nuclear and climate) that make the U.S. and Russia “doomed to cooperate” (in Sig Hecker’s phrase).
About the Speakers:
Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association’s James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive’s online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.
Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs (since 2001) at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University. She is the author, with Thomas Blanton, of the book The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), and editor of the book by the late Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Missiles of November (Stanford: Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012). Dr. Savranskaya won the Link-Kuehl Prize in 2011 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, recognizing the best documentary publication over the previous two years, for her book (with Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok) “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2010). She is author and co-author of several publications on Gorbachev’s foreign policy and nuclear learning and the end of the Cold War, and numerous electronic briefing books on these subjects. She serves as an adjunct professor teaching U.S.-Russian relations at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C. (since 2001).