Huskey, Eugene 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born December 2, 1952, in Leesburg, FL; son of Everette (a realtor) and Suzanne Rasmussen (a homemaker) Huskey; married Janet Martinez (an attorney), January 10, 1979; children: Sarah Emilia, Charlotte Louisa. Education: Vanderbilt University, B.A., 1974; University of Essex, M.A., 1976; attended Moscow State University, 1979-80; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, Ph.D., 1983.

ADDRESSES:

Home—DeLand, FL. Office—Stetson University, Box 8313, DeLand, FL 32723; fax: 386-822-7569. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, visiting instructor, 1981-83; Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, assistant professor, 1983-89; Stetson University, DeLand, FL, associate professor, 1989-96, professor, 1996—, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Political Science and Russian Studies, 1999—.

WRITINGS:

Russian Lawyers and the Soviet State, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1976.

(Editor) Executive Power and Soviet Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Soviet State, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1992.

Presidential Power in Russia, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1999.

Contributor to academic journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Eugene Huskey once told CA: "My interest in things Russian emerged, strangely enough, in Florida in the 1960s. In October 1962, as a boy in a small central Florida town, I experienced nuclear attack drills and the drone of tanks and planes massing for what we all assumed would be an attack on Cuba. A few years later, I found myself in one of the first high school programs in Russian language in the state. I was hooked.

"My intellectual baptism in Russian studies came during the 1979-80 academic year, which I spent in the law faculty of Moscow State University. I had gone to Russia to research a dissertation on the Russian Bar and its destruction by the Bolsheviks. The subject revealed two important elements of Russian history in the period from the Great Reforms of the 1860s through the Stalin era: the strength of liberal thought and institutions in late imperial Russia, and the methods used by the Bolsheviks to destroy an incipient Russian liberalism.

"I have continued to work on the formation and development—and now the dismantling—of Communist legal institutions, with articles on historical subjects, and on contemporary questions of law and justice. The study of law spawned related work on the rise of a new Russian state. A book on the Yeltsin presidency attempted to explain why Russia has been unable to construct a liberal state, which is a prerequisite for market and democratic reforms. A series of articles followed that examined the politics of the Putin presidency and the bureaucratic barriers to the emergence of a modern state and economy."

Huskey later added: "At the end of the 1980s I developed an interest in the Central Asian republic of Kirgizia, an interest spawned by contacts with Krygyz students at Moscow State University and nurtured by membership in a study group on political and economic developments outside Moscow that was led by Jerry Hough of Duke University. The first of several research visits to the region took place in early 1992, just as the Soviet republic of Kirgizia was making its transition to the independent country of Kyrgyzstan. In a dozen articles and book chapters on postcommunist Kyrgyzstan, I have explored the effects of cultural legacies, institutional design, and leadership politics on the shaping of this new Central Asian state."