Stephen V. Bittner
Associate Professor of History
Research
Research
I am the author of The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw (Cornell, 2008), which investigates the fate of Moscow's Arbat neighborhood, a Soviet version of Saint-Germain des Prés, during the cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years. I am also the editor of the memoirs of Dmitrii Shepilov, The Kremlin's Scholar (Yale, 2007). Shepilov was a high-ranking official in the Soviet Communist Party who was implicated in an unsuccessful coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.
In recent years I have turned my attention to a more enjoyable topic, the history of winemaking in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The result, I hope, will be a book entitled "Whites and Reds: Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar."
For more details on my scholarly interests, please see FRESCA.