Alex Rabinowitch  is now Emeritus Professor of History at Indiana University, where he began teaching in 1968, and Associate Research Scholar, St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences.  His more than twenty former doctoral students teach at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

In major ways, the Russian revolution has shaped his entire life.  His father was the well-known St. Petersburg-born physical chemist and publicist Eugene I. Rabinowitch.  His mother, Anya, born in Zhitomir, was an actress in Russian theater.  Both fled Russia in 1918 and on the eve of World War II settled near Boston.  Alex and his twin brother, Victor, grew up in communities of prominent Russian émigré scholars and cultural and political figures, among whom were Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Kerensky, Michael Karpovich, Vladimir Zenzinov, Irakli Tsereteli, and Boris Nikolaevsky.  It was from them that Alex first developed a strong interest in Russian history and culture.

Most of Alex’s historical research and writing has focused on the revolutionary and civil war eras in Russian history.  He was one of the first Western scholars permitted to conduct research on Communist party history in Soviet archives, including the former KGB archive.  A Russian translation of The Bolsheviks Come to Power was the first major Western work on the Russian revolution published in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.

Alex’s books have been published in Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, British, German, Korean, Turkish, and Indian editions, and new centennial editions of The Bolsheviks Come to Power have been published or will soon be issued in France, Italy, Slovenia, Greece, Great Britain, and the United States.  He has written or co-edited seven books, and his numerous essays and reviews have appeared in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers in this country and abroad.  Currently, his primary publication project is a book titled “The Bolsheviks Survive: Government and Crises in Civil War Petrograd.”  He spends part of each year conducting research in Russian historical archives.

Alex has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, and of the Council on Foreign Relations; a Senior Fellow at the Harriman Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at Columbia University and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  He has also served as consultant for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Initiative in the Former Soviet Union.  He is the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Knox College, a Thomas Hart Benton medallion for distinguished service to Indiana University, and the 2015 ASEEES Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Representative Publications:

The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana University Press, 2007).

The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The 1917 Revolution in Petrograd (Norton, 1976)

Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana University Press, 1968)