Stephen Kotkin

Kotkin joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1989 and was the director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program for thirteen years (1995–2008) and is currently the co-director of the Certificate Program in History and Diplomacy (2015–present). He is the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton. He is also a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Starting in 1986, Kotkin traveled to the Soviet Union and then Russia multiple times for academic research and fellowships. He was a visiting scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1995, 1998, 1999 and 2012) and its predecessor, the USSR Academy of Sciences (1991). He was also a visiting scholar at University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science in 1994 and 1997.

Kotkin graduated from the University of Rochester in 1981 with a B.A. in English. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1988, both in history.

Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959) is an American historian, academic and author. He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he is also Co-Director of the Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy and the Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

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. In 2001, he published Armageddon Averted, a short history of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Kotkin's most recent book is his second of three planned volumes which discuss the life and times of the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, namely Stalin, Vol. II, Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941 (2017).

His first volume on the life of Stalin, a 900-page biography analyzing his life through 1928, received strong reviews. Jennifer Siegel of The New York Times called the biography "a riveting tale, one written with pace and aplomb. [...] [T]his first volume leaves the reader longing for the story still to come". The second volume Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 was published in late 2017.