Seweryn Bialer, 92, Defector and Soviet Union Scholar, Dies

His wife, the scholar Joan Afferica, said the cause was heart failure.

Bialer, who taught at Columbia University for 33 years, was a sought-after voice on Soviet affairs, testifying to congressional committees, participating in conferences, writing commentaries in journals and newspapers and appearing on television and radio.

He was especially in demand in the 1980s as the Soviet Union went through a series of upheavals, including the deaths of three leaders in rapid succession — Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko — and the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev. If few Kremlinologists foresaw just how much turbulence Gorbachev’s tenure would bring, Bialer at least realized early on that the new leader was a harbinger of change.

“The free lunch period is over,” he told The Boston Globe in April 1985, reflecting on the likelihood that the West would no longer be dealing with Soviet stagnation under aging, ill leaders. His comment came just a month after Gorbachev replaced Chernenko as general secretary of the Communist Party.

Bialer was well regarded for illuminating Soviet history, as he did in his first book, “Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II” (1969). The book assembled excerpts from the writings of the country’s wartime leaders to shed light on how a man as unstable as Josef Stalin could have led a successful war effort.

“Thanks to Bialer’s editorial skill,” William E. Butler wrote in reviewing the book in The Globe, “we have remarkable insight into the decision-making apparatus, the work habits, and the personal relationships within the Soviet High Command during a period of extreme crisis.”

Bialer influenced generations of students, some of whom became scholars themselves, like Linda Cook, a professor of political science and Slavic studies at Brown University.

“Professor Bialer was brilliant and engaging in the classroom,” she said by email, “and, because of his experience living in Eastern Europe before he came to Columbia, he had a unique ability to explain Soviet politics to American students and colleagues.”

Seweryn Bialer (pronounced seh-VER-in BYA-ler) was born Nov. 3, 1926, in Berlin and raised in Lodz, Poland, in a prominent Jewish family. At 13, with the country under German occupation, he was relocated to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. There he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, which later became an area of his expertise, and joined the Communist underground. For almost a year at the end of the war he was imprisoned at the Auschwitz and Friedland camps.

After the war ended, Bialer held posts in the Polish government and the Polish Communist Party. He later told a congressional committee, “I was one of the chiefs of the anti-Western and anti-American propaganda.”

He was also admitted to the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute for the Education of Scientific Cadres, receiving a doctorate there with a dissertation on the Marshall Plan.

In 1954, the year after Stalin died, Bialer made his first trip to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation from the Polish Communist Party, and his disenchantment began.

“I came to realize that the system there involved all of the things I had fought against in Nazism,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “And I made my decision on this basis to leave that system at the first opportunity.”

The opportunity came in January 1956, when, on an official trip to East Berlin, he defected to West Berlin. By June of that year he was testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee about the inner workings of the Soviet system. That year he also published an essay in the journal News From Behind the Iron Curtain titled, “I Chose Truth: A Former Leading Communist’s Story.”

“For a very long time I thought that poverty, waste, terror, and falsehood were the inevitable price every revolution has to pay for progress,” he wrote. “Having been for many years active in the Party, I was thoroughly familiar with its working methods, its system of government, and I arrived at the conclusion that it was a system doomed to live on corruption, generate waste, and produce poverty.”

After several years as a research analyst for U.S. government agencies, Bialer joined the Columbia faculty in 1964 and began work on his Ph.D. there, earning it in political science in 1966 with a dissertation on the Soviet political elite.

In 1980, Bialer published his second book, “Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability and Change in the Soviet Union.”

“In the next decade,” historian James Chace wrote in reviewing it for The Times, “the world is likely to be a more dangerous place than anything we have known for at least a generation. In order to contain almost certain disorder, we had best try to understand the sources of Soviet conduct, and reading Seweryn Bialer is one of the best ways to begin.”

In 1983, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” In 1986, he published another book, “The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline.” He also edited or contributed to many others.

He married Afferica, now the L. Clark Seelye professor emeritus of history at Smith College, in 1967. She is his only immediate survivor.

Cook, his former student, recalled Bialer’s “vivid way of communicating ideas.”

“At some point in the late 1970s he was giving a lecture in a large auditorium at Columbia,” she said of one particular instance, “explaining the mentality of the then-current Soviet elite, their loss of ideological conviction. Looking over the 200-300 academics in the hall, he said, ‘There are more people in this room who have seriously studied Lenin than in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee.'”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.