Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: With the death of Professor John N. Hazard on 7 April 1995, the profession lost one of its founding giants, and Nationalities Papers, along with the Association for the Study of Nationalities, is deprived of a staunch supporter.During the years when a focus on the nationalities question was viewed as peripheral, indeed, marginal, John Hazard lent more than moral support to the journal and its intellectual perspective.Despite his focus on the Soviet constitution and on Soviet law Professor Hazard was more than aware of the multi-national complexity of Soviet society.His last book, The Soviet Legal System: the law in the 1980s (1984), clearly anticipated the internal stresses and strains the USSR was to undergo in the following years.Since 1988, John Hazard, though already retired, lent his active support and considerable prestige to the journal's collaboration with the Harriman Institute of Columbia University.He participated enthusiastically and substantively in the annual spring conferences assessing the status of the relationship between Gorbachev's central government and the non-Russian republics.Without fail he applied his keen insight to the understanding of the unraveling of the Soviet Union; above all, he showed how the constitution proved less and less effective in accommodating the interests of Russians and non-Russians.Hazard led a rich and varied life.After graduating from Harvard Law School, he was the first American to study law in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s.During the Second World War he worked for the US government on the Lend-Lease program, rising to become its deputy director.After the war, Hazard assisted Justice Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, before joining Columbia University in 1946, where he remained until his retirement.In those early years, Hazard was instrumental in founding both the Columbia University Russian Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.His legacy also lives on through the work of numerous colleagues he inspired and generations of students he mentored.Henry R. Huttenbach
Source: Nationalities Papers
Author: Ian Bremmer
Institution: Hoover Institution
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2907495232