Bertrand M. Patenaude
Research Fellow

Expertise: Russian and modern European history

Patenaude is the author of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, newly published by HarperCollins. The book was published in June as Stalin’s Nemesis (Faber and Faber) in the United Kingdom, where it received enthusiastic reviews and was serialized on BBC Radio as its Book of the Week. Patenaude is also the author of A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University Press, 2006), a richly illustrated coffee-table book that showcases the Hoover Archives’ extraordinary collections, spanning the entire twentieth century. He also published The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and the 2004 Uncommon Book Award. The Big Show in Bololand will be the basis of a one-hour documentary film for Public Television. The film, now in production, will be broadcast as part of the award-winning series AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.

He has also edited several books, including, with Terence Emmons, War, Revolution, and Peace in Russia: The Passages of Frank Golder, 1914–1927 (Hoover Institution Press, 1992); The Russian Revolution (Garland, 1992); Stalin and Stalinism (Garland, 1992); and Soviet Scholarship under Gorbachev (Center for Russian and East European Studies, Stanford, 1988).

He has authored several articles, including "Herbert Hoover's Brush with Bolshevism" (Kennan Institute Occasional Papers, 1992), and his book reviews have appeared in academic journals such as Slavic Review, Journal of Modern History, and Russian Review and in The Wall Street Journal.

Among his important discoveries in the Hoover Archives is a 1922 Russian-language book manuscript by the Moscow economist Lev Litoshenko. The anonymous manuscript, unidentified for decades, turned out to be a first-rate study of Bolshevik agrarian policies during the early years of Soviet power, with special emphasis on the utopian civil war policies known as War Communism. Patenaude determined the authorship of the manuscript and his efforts led to its publication in Russia as Sotsializatsiia zemli v Rossii [Socialization of the Land in Russia] (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 2001), edited by Patenaude together with a team of his Russian colleagues.

Patenaude taught for eight years (1992–2000) in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where his outstanding performance as a classroom instructor was recognized with the Schieffelin Award for Teaching Excellence (top 5%) for two consecutive years (1998, 1999).

Patenaude's interest in documentary film has led to his involvement in the making of three documentary films that were broadcast nationwide. He served as associate producer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS film Inside the USSR and of the FRONTLINE documentary A Journey to Russia, and he was story editor and associate producer of Stalin's Ghost, an NBC NEWS Special Report.

At Stanford, Patenaude has worked extensively with the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES) to organize and conduct workshops for Bay Area high school teachers, beginning in the winter of 2000 with a four-day workshop series titled "The Cold War in Our Past and Present," cosponsored by the Bay Area Global Education Program. Patenaude headlined two of the four sessions, with lectures on the origins and the outcome of the Cold War. He also organized the program in 2001, when the topic was "Balkan Ghosts or Balkan Monsters: Who's To Blame for the Death of Yugoslavia?" He again gave two of the four presentations and enlisted the other workshop lecturers.

Patenaude has traveled and lectured throughout Central and Eastern Europe for Stanford University Travel/Study, the Smithsonian Institution, Special Expeditions, and the World Affairs Council of San Francisco. He spent the 1990–91 academic year as a research scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. He has been a Title VIII visiting scholar (1987–88) and a National Fellow (1989–90) at the Hoover Institution. He spent the 1982–83 academic year in Moscow as a Fulbright scholar.

Patenaude received his B.A. from Boston College in 1977, his M.A. from Stanford University in 1979, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1987. He also attended the University of Vienna both as an undergraduate (1975–76) and as a postgraduate (1977–78) student.