Tomasz Blusiewicz

About

Tomasz Blusiewicz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Blusiewicz is a historian of modern Europe and Russia, with emphasis on the intersection of economics, trade, and politics in the Baltic Sea region. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Return of the Hanseatic League, or How the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945–1991. This project grew from a doctoral dissertation Blusiewicz defended at Harvard University. In it, he develops a transnational perspective on the Baltic region, from Hamburg in the west to Leningrad in the east, and highlights the role played by Hanseatic port cities such as Rostock, Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, and Riga, all of which served as “windows to the world” linking Communist-controlled Europe with the globalizing world in the Cold War era.

Blusiewicz’s manuscript is based on archival materials from more than a dozen archives from six countries: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Its empirical base rests on the recently declassified documents produced by the East German, Polish, and Soviet Communist security organs such as the Stasi and the KGB. A part of his Soviet-related findings has been published by the Journal of East Central European Studies (https://www.zfo-online.de/portal/index.php/zfo/article/view/10688).

Between 2017 and 2022, Blusiewicz worked as a history professor at the University of Tyumen, Russia. He helped to establish the only remaining English-language liberal arts college in Russia, the School of Advanced Studies, in the West Siberian city of Tyumen. There he designed and taught more than ten courses on modern history and international relations until March 2022, when he resigned from his position in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Blusiewicz also designed, launched, and directed a master’s program in Analytics and Consulting in International Relations. This program was taught in English mostly by US-educated scholars and professionals until it was suspended by the authorities in March 2022. 

Blusiewicz is a graduate of the University of Chicago.