Valdai Club

Professor of political science at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He received his doctorate in political science from Columbia University and teaches courses on comparative politics, democracy and democratization, comparative institutions, international security, and the politics of the post-Soviet region. His book, Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, was published in an expanded, translated edition by Rosspen (Moscow), a leading academic publisher. He is also the co-author of The Fight for Legitimacy: Democracy vs. Terrorism.  

Thom has contributed chapters to several edited volumes and his articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Comparative Politics, Washington Quarterly, National Interest, Problems of Communism, Ab Imperio, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Prepodavanie istorii i obshchestvovedeniia v shkole (Russia), and Rossiia v global’noi politike (Russia).  He has also written chapters for White Papers on Russia (2019) and China (2019) commissioned by the Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA, DoD) in its Future of Global Competition and Conflict project. 

Thom’s opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times (international edition), the Washington Post (the Monkey Cage), and the Valdai Discussion Club. and other news outlets. He has served as a consultant or project manager for the Carnegie Council, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Open Society Foundations (Ukraine), and EUROCLIO in The Netherlands, among other institutions.  He has given invited presentations at Columbia University, Yale University, Wesleyan University, TRADOC, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and other academic and government institutions.  

Thom frequently conducts field research in post-Soviet space, including the supervision of large-N national surveys and focus groups in Russia. His current research examines the character of Russian nationalism; popular and elite assessments of Russian history; the quality of democratic values in Russia, and antisemitism in post-communist space.  .