Professor Emeritus Vojtěch Mastný

International Relations Historian

“Not only did I live through the entire Cold War and its aftermath, but I also earned a living by teaching and writing about it.
My experiences in the country where I was born, Czechoslovakia, formed my decision to leave it behind when the Cold War’s incipient détente made what counted there as normal life better, but not good enough for me. In 1962, the Soviet bloc’s opening to the Third World provided a window of opportunity through which I escaped to America, via Tunisia, even as the concurrent Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to nullify my plan by escalating into a real war, if not a nuclear Holocaust.
Columbia University, pre-eminent in its support of Washington’s Cold War policy, enabled me to start a new life in America. It helped me earn my Ph.D. and take off as a junior member of its faculty in the field of area studies where the area I came from seemed critical for the fate of détente. My subsequent specialization in contemporary history sought to explain the Cold War from the Soviet side and its likely evolution at a time it appeared interminable.
As the Cold War’s unexpected resolution was approaching, a windfall of fellowships and grants enabled me to witness on the ground where the conflict had started and was now ending—in Europe. Once it was over and the opening of archives in the former Soviet bloc allowed to document from inside evidence what previously could only be speculated about, I made the study of the Cold War from the hindsight central to my scholarship. Back in the United States on the eve of the new century, I directed for twelve years an international research network, based in Switzerland, which aimed at understanding the under-researched military dimensions of the Cold War while focusing on the evolution of NATO and its defunct counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. In doing so, I came to appreciate the importance of other actors than the superpowers, especially the middle and small powers capable of punching above their weight, such as the Nordic countries, but particularly the Netherlands.
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