Mark von Hagen

Mark von Hagen (born 1954) teaches Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history at Arizona State University. He was formerly at Columbia University. He is the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Cornell, 1990); co-editor (with Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut and Frank Sysyn) of Culture, Nation, Identity: the Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945 (Toronto, 2003); and has co-edited (with Jane Burbank and Anatoly Remnev) the title Geographies of Empire: Ruling Russia, 1700-1991 (Indiana, 2004). He has written articles and essays on topics in historiography, civil-military relations, nationality politics and minority history, and cultural history.
Von Hagen was educated at Georgetown University, Indiana University-Bloomington, and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. He has also taught at Stanford University, Yale University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He served as Associate Director and then Director of the Harriman Institute (1989–2001). In the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, he chaired the task force on review of the school’s curriculum, headed its Inter-regional Council, and served as director of the master’s program in international affairs.
He is on the editorial boards of Ab Imperio and Kritika. Von Hagen serves (and has served) on several professional association boards (the National Council for Eurasian and East European Studies, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Association for the Study of Nationalities, among others). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Human Rights Watch Eurasia Steering Committee. He serves as a consultant for the Russian Archives Project of Primary Source Microfilms (Gale Group). From 2002 to 2005 Von Hagen was president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies.
Prof. Mark von Hagen was also commissioned by The New York Times to write an independent assessment of New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty and his reporting on the Soviet Union after the newspaper received a letter from the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding allegations of Duranty's cover up of communist genocide.
The Ukrainian Weekly reports as follows:
In the letter, the board said it was responding to "a new round of demands" that the prize awarded to Mr. Duranty in 1932 be revoked, The New York Times reported. The letter asked the newspaper for its comments on Mr. Duranty's work.
As part of its review of Mr. Duranty's work, The New York Times commissioned Dr. von Hagen, an expert on early 20th century Soviet history, to examine nearly all of what Mr. Duranty wrote for The New York Times in 1931.
"After reading through a good portion of Duranty's reporting for 1931, I was disappointed and disturbed by the overall picture he painted of the Soviet Union for that period," Dr. von Hagen wrote. "But after reading so much of Duranty in 1931 it is far less surprising to me that he would deny in print the famine of 1932-1933."
Asked if his opinion of Mr. Duranty's reporting would change if he were to examine only those 13 articles for which Mr. Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, Dr. von Hagen replied with a resolute no. The reporting for which he won the Pulitzer Prize was "quintessential of the problems of Mr. Duranty's analysis," Dr. von Hagen said. The professor said that Mr. Duranty's award "diminishes the prize's value."