Jonathan Haslam

Jonathan Haslam is a leading scholar on the history of thought in international relations and on the history of Soviet Foreign Policy. He has retired as the George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is Professor Emeritus in the History of International Relations at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy.

His latest book is The Spectre of War. International Communism and the Origins of the Second World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). He also wrote Near and Distant Neighbours. A New History of Soviet Intelligence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and many other works, including the only biography of E.H. Carr.  

          The Spectre of War contains a wealth of new information that should transform our understanding of how the war came about and not only from Russian archives but also archives across the face of Europe. A great deal is based on newly declassified Russian documents from Comintern, Narkomindel, the GUGB NKVD and the People’s Commissariat of Defence in the Stalin régime.