Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic and author
Education
Kotkin graduated from the University of Rochester in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald East. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Master of Arts in 1983 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1988, both in history.
Career
He is currently a professor in history and international affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at Stanford University"s Hoover Institution. Kotkin"s most recent book is his first of three planned volumes, which discuss the life and times of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (2014). Starting in 1986, Kotkin traveled to the former Soviet Union multiple times for academic research and fellowships.
He was a visiting scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2012),and its predecessor, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Academy of Sciences (1991).
He was also a visiting scholar at University of Tokyo"s Institute of Social Science Institute in 1994 and 1997 He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1989, and was the director of in Russian and Eurasian Studies Program for 13 years (1995-2008). He is currently the John P. Birkelund "52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton.
He is also a West. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University"s Hoover Institution.
Politics
Kotkin has authored several nonfiction books on history as well as textbooks, and is perhaps best known for Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, which exposes the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s.