TRISKA, Jan Francis 1922-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born January 26, 1922, in Prague, Czechoslovakia; died February 20, 2003, in Menlo Park, CA. Educator and author. Triska was a political scientist and authority on Communist Eastern Europe. His early studies in law at Charles University in Prague were interrupted when the Germans closed the school in 1939 and he was shipped to a labor camp, where he was imprisoned until American forces liberated him in 1945. Triska then returned to Czechoslovakia, but had to flee when the government was overthrown by the Communists. He immigrated to the United States via West Germany, ending up at Yale University, where he completed his LL.M. in 1950 and J.SD. in 1952. He then earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1957. After teaching at Harvard for two years, Triska became co-director of the Soviet Treaties project at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. In the late 1950s he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and then Cornell University before returning to Stanford as an associate professor in 1960. He remained at Stanford for the rest of his career, becoming a full professor in 1965 and retiring in 1989; he was also the head of Stanford Studies of the Communist System in the late 1980s and cochair of the international relations program. Triska was highly respected for his ability to analyze events in Europe with an objective eye, despite his personal experiences there, and his publications on the subject were well received. Among his published works are Soviet Communism: Program and Rules (1962), Constitutions of the Communist Party-States (1968), and The Great War's Forgotten Front: A Soldier's Diary and a Son's Reflections (1998). He also edited and coauthored several other books.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 2003, p. A16.

online

Stanford Report Online,http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ (April 4, 2003).