The Michael S. Bernstam Papers

MSE/REE 0003

Michael Semenovich Bernstam (b. 1943; Russian: Михаил Семёнович Бернштам) is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. As an economic demographer, he has studied economic systems in their relation to income, population, financial development, natural resources, environment, conflict, and other social changes. He was a Soviet-era dissident and one of the founding members of the 1976 Moscow Helsinki Group, which documented human rights violations in the Soviet Union. After immigrating to the United States in 1977, Dr. Bernstam was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and later worked with the Nobel laureate Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in Cavendish, Vermont, before moving to Stanford University in 1981.

The collection reflects Dr. Bernstam's life as a dissident and human rights activist in the USSR during the 1960s and 1970s; as an economic demographer and economist at the Hoover Institution; and as the coordinator of the economic reforms project for the Russian Federation by joint appointment of the Hoover Institution and the Russian Parliament and Government in the 1990s. It comprises personal papers; historical documents related to the Cold War and to economic reforms in Russia during the 1990s (including position papers and reform projects); published and unpublished manuscripts (some with handwritten comments by writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn); Russian government documents and memoranda (authenticated by Boris Yeltsin and other political figures); photographs, and correspondence. A notable part of the collection is a voluminous correspondence (1977-2004) with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his family on a variety of topics concerning Soviet and Russian history, politics, and economy. Many materials in the collection are accompanied by Dr. Bernstam's detailed commentaries (over 200 pages).

Dr. Bernstam's outline of collection [PDF]