Her great-grandfather was Benzion Tumarkin from Bessarabia. Nina Tumar- kin, Professor of History and Director of Russian Area Studies at Wellesley College, is a longtime Associate of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (for- merly the Russian Research Center.) President Bill Clinton read her book on World War I ni Russian memory and myth, The Living and the Dead, in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow in May 1995. Nina is also the author of Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. At Wellesley College, where she has taught since 1975 (after receiving her PhD from Harvard the same year), Nina teaches courses in all periods of Russia's dramatic history- Medieval, Imperial, and Soviet - as well as Modern European history. She has lectured on alumni cruises in Russia, East Europe, the Dalmatian coast, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. His current research project, Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia, explores the many ways in which Russian political elites and groups from liberal oppositionists to ultra-nationalists have been remembering, celebrating, commemorating, condem- ning, condoning, forgetting, ignoring and grappling with the country's troubled past and the vastly complex history and legacy of the Soviet experience in World War II and its fateful aftermath. She examine the historical politics informing the state's pro- tean "usable past" to support regnant political and social structures and norms.