James Heinzen

About

James Heinzen, a historian who specializes in the Soviet Union, was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution for 2008 – 2009. Heinzen has written widely about developments in the USSR between 1917 and 1991. A professor of history at Rowan University in New Jersey, he is a specialist on the history of corruption, bribery, Soviet politics and society, the underground economy, the historical backdrop to contemporary corruption, and anticorruption campaigns in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Heinzen’s current project examines bribery and corruption in the USSR in the decades after World War II. A book based on this research, The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953, was published in 2016 by Yale University Press in the Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes. This study focuses on law, repression, and everyday life in the period of High Stalinism. His articles on this subject have appeared in many leading scholarly journals. Heinzen’s new project is an archive-based study of the second economy and black markets in the final decades of Soviet power. His research has been supported by grants from sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Council on East European and Eurasian Research (NCEEER), and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Heinzen’s first book was titled Inventing a Soviet Countryside: The Soviet State and the Transformation of Rural Russia before Collectivization (2004). Heinzen earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children.