Eminent Historian Adam Ulam Dies

Adam B. Ulam, a Harvard historian known for his shrewd understanding of the inner workings of the Soviet Union, particularly at the time of Lenin and Stalin, died Tuesday in a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 77.


The cause was lung cancer, his family said. In the days before he died, he was revising, from his hospital bed, the autobiography he planned to publish on the Internet. The first chapter is available at www.aulam.org.


Ulam traveled to Russia just once, for a brief trip in the mid-1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning the reforms that would result in the collapse of the Soviet Union. An immigrant from Poland, Ulam often joked that he preferred "overdeveloped countries" with good food and comfortable beds.


Yet his encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet system - from the roots of the Bolshevik Revolution in 19th-century Russia, to Stalin's strategies for terror, to arcane details of Politburo procedure - was regarded by Harvard colleagues as without peer, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.


Lacking any access to the Soviet archives, which were opened after he had written all but one of his 18 books, Ulam informed himself through voracious reading of newspapers, journals and memoirs and by panning scholarly gold out of the vast and numbingly dull official literature of communism.


The book for which Ulam is best known is "Stalin: The Man and His Era" (Viking, 1973). It showed how the not-especially-smart son of a Georgian cobbler, who was scorned by Trotsky as "the most eminent mediocrity in the party," consolidated power and how he used it with genocidal fury.


An earlier book by Ulam, "The Bolsheviks" (Macmillan, 1965), was praised in a Times review by Henry L. Roberts as "the most rewarding single study of Lenin that I have encountered."


"The really impressive feature of Ulam's book is that he is thinking hard all the way," Roberts wrote, adding that his "intellectual seriousness is a great relief and pleasure."


Ulam was known at Harvard as a man who did not take himself or his work all that seriously. When Nikita Khrushchev was unexpectedly purged in 1964, Ulam was asked why he hadn't predicted it.


"If it came as a surprise to Khrushchev, why wouldn't it come as a surprise to me?" he replied.


Ulam dressed haphazardly, often wearing a jacket from a blue suit with pants from a brown suit to Harvard's Russian Research Center, where he was the director throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s.


Nearly every morning - and he often worked seven days a week - he went to the coffee room at the center at Harvard and visited with colleagues and students for an hour or so.


He loved coffee, and ignored rules about not smoking in his office.


Adam Bruno Ulam was born on April 8, 1922, in Lvov, Poland, which is now in Ukraine. He lived there until the age of 16, enjoying weekends in the Carpathian Mountains and "the protectiveness of a rich extended family," according to his autobiography.


At the insistence of his father, who was worried about Hitler, Adam and his older brother, Stanislaw, fled Poland in mid-August 1939, just a few weeks before Germany invaded.


Stanislaw went on to become an eminent mathematician and helped develop the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos.


In 1975, in a radio interview that showcased his uncanny intuition, Ulam said seismic change in Moscow was quite possible.


"Now let us imagine that 10 years from now, some individual or group in the Politburo emerges with the avowed intent of laying to rest all remnants of Stalinism and starting the Soviet Union on its way to the 20th century," Ulam said.


"Modernization, rationalization, economic reform, political relaxation and the proper observance of the Soviet Constitution would follow. In the political and cultural climate created by such a change, I cannot see how Romanian, Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian claims for independence could be resisted."


Ten years after Ulam said that, Gorbachev came to power.


Ulam is survived by two sons who live in New York, Alexander Stanislaw, and Joseph.