Recent archival releases shed new light on Nikita Khrushchev's motivations during the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis. The new evidence together with distance in time presents an opportunity for a retrospective look at Khrushchev's reforms and their significance for the development of Soviet elites, as well as for the fate of the Soviet Union.

Vladislav Zubok is an associate professor of History at Temple University, as well as a former Wilson Center public policy scholar and a senior scholar with the Center's Cold War International History Project. He has held a number of research and teaching positions over the years. He served as director of the US-Russian advanced faculty training program for humanities and social sciences from 2007-2010 and has also been s senior research fellow-in-residence at the George Washington University's National Security Archive. Zubok was a senior series consultant (with John Lewis Gaddis and Lawrence Freedman) on CNN's award-winning 24 hour documentary series "The Cold War."

Zubok is author of a number of path-breaking books, including most recently, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009). His other major works include A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007), Russian Anti-Americanism: From Stalin to Putin, with Eric Shiraev (2000), and Inside the Kremlin's Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev, with Constantin Pleshakov (1996).

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