4 In memoriam: Ladis D. Kristof, 1918-2010 Ladis “Kris” Kristof, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and longtime RAPS member, died June 15, 2010, at his farm home. His family and many friends gathered on June 23 for a funeral mass of Christian burial and a reception at St. John’s parish church in Yamhill. Professor Kristof was born Nov. 26, 1918--two weeks after the World War I armistice--on his Armenian-Polish family’s extensive estate near Cernauti, capital city of the Austro-Hungarian imperial duchy of Bukovina. In 1919 the victorious Allied Powers assigned that province to Romania; in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II the Soviet Union annexed it to Ukraine. Those historic sovereignty transformations heavily influenced the course of Ladis’s life. Already fluent in several languages, Ladis studied forestry at the University of Poznan in Poland from 1937 to 1939. The Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 launched warfare that lasted until 1945 and ushered in the nightmare of Soviet Russian domination of Eastern Europe. In the welter of those events, the Kristof family lost its properties and suffered equally at the hands of Nazi and Communist regimes. In a recent RAPS presentation Ladis shared his life experiences. He described escaping from his homeland in 1948 with a perilous nighttime swim across the Danube River, seeking refuge in Tito’s Yugoslavia, which had recently broken out of the Soviet orbit. After two years of forced labor in Serbia’s forests, Ladis managed to join an exile community in Paris where in 1952 he obtained sponsorship for resettlement in Oregon to be employed as a logger. Ladis completed a political science baccalaureate degree at Reed College in 1955. Encouraged by the late Professor Frank Munk, he next pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, earning masters and doctoral degrees in 1956 and 1969. During the ensuing years Ladis held various specialized teaching, research, and administrative positions at the Hoover Institution, Hunter College, and five major universities: Chicago, Temple, Stanford, Santa Clara, and Waterloo in Canada. In 1971 Kris joined PSU’s Political Science Department as an associate professor. He actively promoted this institution’s Slavic studies offerings provided through its Central European Center and overseas extension at the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia. Service as associate director of the Central European Studies Center (197274) and as interim department head (1979-80), as well as continuous participation in university governance committees, brought him into contact with academic units across the campus. Likewise, his engagement in curricular and program development added an important and enduring dimension to the university’s international studies offerings. Professor Kristof’s tireless research activities produced many scholarly books, monographs, and journal articles, and prompted regular invitations to present papers and lectures at international universities and scholarly conferences. He actively participated in significant academic organizations and regularly contributed reviews of books published in various languages. To support ongoing research projects, the Fulbright Commission awarded him fellowships at the University of Bucharest in Romania in 1971 and again in 1984-85. After retiring from PSU in 1990 he held part-time teaching positions at various Oregon academic institutions. As a young man in Chicago, Ladis met Jane McWilliams, an art historian, and they married in 1956. After moving to Oregon, they settled on a farm near Gaston. Jane earned a doctoral degree from Columbia in 1972, joined the PSU Department of Art in 1973, and is now a professor emerita and RAPS member. On their farm home the Kristofs reared their son Nicholas (born 1959), a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times editorial columnist. His moving tribute, “My Father’s Gift to Me,” appeared in the New York Times on June 16, 2010, and was republished in the Oregonian on June 20, 2010. The Oregonian also presented an in-depth account of Professor Kristof’s life career on June 18, 2010. These articles can be downloaded on the Internet, and hard copies may be examined in the RAPS office files. Ladis is survived by his wife, Jane; his son, Nicholas, and daughter-in-law, Sheryl WuDunn; and grandchildren, Gregory, Geoffrey, and Caroline. To them, the RAPS executive board extends its heartfelt sympathies. Throughout his lifetime, this honorable, caring and generous colleague actively supported causes that defend human rights and justice, and worked to ensure peace for all mankind. --Victor C. Dahl, Emeritus Professor of History
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