printable versionMemorial Resolution: Jan Triska
Jan Triska
Jan Triska
Jan Triska, professor emeritus of political science since 1989, died on February 20, 2003, at the age of 81. He was widely respected as a scholar of great erudition and independent mind, and universally liked for his genial and affable personality.
Jan Triska was born in 1922 in Prague, in the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. His parents owned a grocery store, and he had a normal middle-class upbringing. He had an abiding admiration for the first president of the Republic, Tomas Masaryk, who guided his country to independence and democracy.
In 1938 and 1939 Czechoslovakia was dismembered under pressure from Nazi Germany, and in 1939 Germany occupied what remained of the country. Triska finished high school in 1941. The Germans had closed the universities, so he did a course in office skills and worked as a clerk. In 1942 he was arrested without charge and sent to a forced labor camp in Germany, where he remained until the camp was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945. He made his way back to Prague and joined the Czech Revolutionary Guard just before the Germans surrendered.
After the war, Czechoslovak universities organized accelerated degree courses to enable students to make up for lost time. Triska entered Charles University as a law student in 1945 and was about to take his final exams when the communists seized power in February 1948. He had been very active in the law students' association and was a supporter of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (not to be confused with Nazis), the party of Edvard Benes, Masaryk's friend and colleague and now the country's president.
These affiliations made Triska suspect in the eyes of the new communist authorities. He managed to graduate and receive his J.U.D. degree, but he was threatened with hard labor by the new regime and clearly had little prospect of a legal career in communist Czechoslovakia. With two of his friends he escaped across the border into the American zone of occupation in Germany, where he spent some months in a refugee camp.
In November 1948 Triska traveled to the United States and entered Yale Law School, to which he had applied while still in Prague. He obtained his LL.M in 1950 and his J.S.D. in 1952, following completion of a dissertation on "State and Government Succession: Theory and Practice." Before finishing his doctorate he came to California to work with the great jurist, Hans Kelsen, at Berkeley. While giving a lecture on the Declaration of Human Rights in Salinas, he met his future wife, Carmel, who was then teaching at Salinas Union High School.
Influenced by the political scientist Harold Lasswell at Yale, Triska decided to supplement his legal studies by studying political science. In 1957 he obtained his PhD in government at Harvard, where he studied under the constitutional theorist Carl J. Friedrich. In 1956 he came to Stanford to work at the Hoover Institution on a project on the Soviet Union and international law. This resulted in two books, co-authored with Robert M. Slusser: A Calendar of Soviet Treaties, 1917-1957 (1959) and The Theory, Law, and Policy of Soviet Treaties (1962). After two years at Cornell University as an assistant professor in political science, he returned to Stanford in 1960 as an associate professor in the department of political science.
Triska was a devoted undergraduate teacher. He taught courses on international law, international relations, the politics of communism, and Soviet foreign policy. He also taught at the Stanford overseas campuses in Krakow, Florence, and Vienna. He helped to set up the International Relations program and co-directed it in the mid-1980s. He served on several occasions as the associate chairman of the department of political science.
He was a serious researcher and a prolific author. Among his books were Soviet Foreign Policy (1968), which he wrote with David Finley, and The World of Superpowers (1985), which he wrote with his Stanford colleagues Robert North and Nobutaka Ike. He edited Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the USSR in Eastern Europe (1986), an interesting and innovative comparison of the two superpowers and the ways in which they maintained their dominant positions in particular regions of the world. He recruited several of his Stanford colleagues for this project, including Condoleezza Rice, Robert Packenham, and Terry Karl.
Triska's student and later co-author David Finley said of Triska's work on communism: "what characterized his approach was to look at it as an interconnected system and infer generalizations and theories about what was happening rather than make moralistic judgments." Notwithstanding his personal experience and his own political commitments, he was very much the detached social scientist. He was attentive to methodology, and careful to differentiate among the communist states and to analyze them not just as an isolated group but in the overall context of world politics. His book on Eastern Europe and Latin America is in that sense characteristic of his dispassionate approach. He was one of those who made Stanford a leading center for the study of communism.
Jan Triska was very active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, which was founded in 1958 at the initiative of Czech and Slovak intellectuals living abroad and of which he was twice president, in 1978-1980 and 1990-1992. His latter term as president began just after the "Velvet Revolution." The Society, with Triska as its president, played a significant role in helping to restructure higher education and legal institutions in post-communist Czechoslovakia. In 2002 he received the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit, First Class, from President Vaclav Havel, for his services to the state.
Triska lived a well-balanced life, combining hard work with a joie de vivre. He was an avid fly-fisherman. He remained active in retirement. In 1998 he published The Great War's Forgotten Front, which contains his father's wartime diary and his own reflections on it. He was writing his memoirs at the time of his death.
He is survived by his wife, two sons, and four granddaughters.
Committee: David Holloway, Chair Michael McFaul