Mark L. von Hagen, a historian of the Soviet period and a specialist on Russia and Ukraine, has been named director of The Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the University has announced.

The institute, based in Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, is the country's oldest major university center for graduate study of the former Soviet Union and the Soviet successor states. Professor von Hagen succeeds Richard E. Ericson, director since 1992 and professor of economics at Columbia, who has returned to full-time teaching.

Professor von Hagen, who was the institute's associate director from 1989 to 1992, joined Columbia's faculty as assistant professor of history in 1985 and was promoted to associate professor in 1989. He received the Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Stanford University, the M.A. in Slavic languages and literatures from Indiana University, and the B.S. summa cum laude from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He has been visiting professor at Stanford and Yale Universities and the Free University of Berlin. He was a Fulbright scholar under the auspices of the International Research and Exchanges Board and a research fellow of the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

He is the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, numerous articles and book chapters on the Soviet military, nationality issues, and Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet history, and a contributor to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History and The Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. He is currently completing work on two new books--Empire and Nation in Russian and Soviet History and Ukraine between Empire and Union: Military and Nationality Politics, 1914-1941. Two major research projects under way are on Russian-Ukrainian relations and the human rights movement in the Sakharov period, for which he was awarded grants from the NEH-Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Ford Foundation, respectively.

Professor von Hagen takes the helm at the Harriman Institute at a critical moment in the post-Soviet era.

While threats to global security will continue to emerge from the former Soviet bloc, he said recently in discussing the current situation, they will no longer focus on the nuclear superpower rivalry of old, but will be the result of ethnic conflicts, environmental disasters, economic destabilization, and the uncontrolled flow of weapons, capital, resources and populations from the region.

"It is essential that studies of the region overcome their past insularity and become integrated with a great variety of disciplines and expertise on other areas of the world," he said. "Current and future generations of scholars must be trained in such crucial but previously neglected fields as science, technology and environmental studies, and area specialists have to extend their focus far beyond Moscow to the Russian peripheries, as well as to the many new states and alignments that have arisen from the disintegration of the USSR. Accordingly, we plan to significantly broaden the teaching curriculum and research programs of the institute and to establish a variety of new collaborations to steer it in the direction necessary to meet the needs of the future."

Columbia's Russian Institute, founded in 1946, was renamed the Harriman Institute in 1982 in honor of W. Averell Harriman, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Governor of New York.

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