Arnold Horelick, Noted Sovietologist and Longtime RAND Researcher, Dies at 96
For Release
Wednesday
January 15, 2025
Arnold Horelick, a political scientist who spent nearly four decades as a RAND Corporation researcher and whose insights into Russian foreign policy and military strength were sought by presidents, Congressional committees and foreign governments, has died. He was 96.
“From the Cold War through the Soviet Union's collapse, Arnold Horelick was regarded as one of the West's most distinguished experts on Russia,” said Jason Matheny, president and chief executive officer of the Santa Monica, California-based RAND. “With his rigorous scholarship and behind-the-scenes knowledge, he provided steady, impartial analysis of the sweeping changes that redefined Russia's role in the world.”
In 1983, Horelick became the founding director of the RAND/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, serving in that position until 1989. He also had been a professor of political science at UCLA.
Steve Clemons, a journalist and former RAND assistant to Horelick, wrote in 2004 that the researcher was “one of those mesmerizing high priests of Soviet studies whose knowledge of the inner workings of the Politburo combined simultaneously with a sophisticated grasp of the throw-weight of Soviet nuclear warheads” to make him “one of the nation's leading gatekeepers of national security policy-making.”
Born in 1928, Arnold Lawrence Horelick received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1948 from Rutgers University. He followed it with a master's degree in international and regional studies in 1950 from Harvard University.
After four years with the USSR section of the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Horelick joined RAND in 1959 and would work on dozens of research projects. One of his first reports, published in 1963, analyzed the Soviet's behavior during the Cuban missile crisis. His final report, from 1996, “Stopping the Decline in U.S.-Russian Relations.”
Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said Horelick played an important part in shaping early U.S. policy in Afghanistan. In 1979, Horelick warned in memos to top officials that Russia “might very well be prepared to intervene on behalf of the ruling group” and asked how far the U.S. might go in covertly backing rebel forces. “While Horelick's forecast was not accurate in every detail, he was remarkably farsighted,” Gates wrote in “From the Shadows,” his 1996 memoir.
In 1977, Horelick took a leave from RAND to spend three years as the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Horelick lectured widely and wrote several books on U.S.-Soviet relations. In 1985, he and five other experts were consulted by President Ronald Reagan before his first summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
After leaving RAND in 1997, Horelick later joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He retired in 2000.