Norman Naimark

Norman Naimark is an American historian and Stanford University professor emeritus specializing in Eastern European, Russian, Soviet, genocide, and war history. He holds the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professorship of Eastern European Studies at Stanford and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where his public work includes scholarship and commentary on Soviet and East European history.

Soviet Records and Testimonies Document Poland’s Wartime Deportations

Hoover fellow Norman Naimark uses the institution’s Polish wartime holdings to document the Soviet seizure and deportation of Poles from eastern Poland after 1939. He argues that the collection’s force lies in the combination of survivor testimony and Soviet identity papers: accounts of arrest, boxcar transport, forced labor, hunger and Gulag life, alongside the documents that later allowed some deportees to leave the Soviet Union after the 1941 alliance shift.

Hoover InstitutionJul 2, 20265 min read