In several senses I was born to be a history teacher. Both my parents were history majors and began their working lives as school teachers in Iowa. Born in 1940 in Cooperstown, New York—site of the Baseball Hall of Fame and also headquarters of the New York State Historical Association—I grew up from 1946 in Williamsburg, Virginia, the restored capital of colonial Virginia. There I soaked up the eighteenth century, so to speak, playing hide-and-go-seek in the boxwood bushes. I often celebrated my birthday at the nearby Yorktown battlefield climbing on cannons and sometimes played in a Civil War earthwork on the edge of town. I loved to read history and historical fiction, such as C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels and Frank Yerby's sexy The Saracen Blade. In the tenth grade I took world history with a superb teacher, Raymond Freed, who lectured nonstop without consulting a note. Roman history interested me more than Russian history then, although I recall sampling a collection of historical tales that included some dramatic episodes from Russian historians such as Nicholas Karamzin on the impostors of the Time of Troubles. This period of Cold War left me with mixed, mostly negative, feelings about Russia and the Soviet Union. I still remember a virulently anti-Soviet speech by a Joseph McCarthy type in about 1952 who condemned "Bloody Joe Stalin" and predicted imminent world war. I also recall how angry people were about the Soviets' crushing of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956.
Yet, when I went off to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in the fall of 1957, I had no plan to study anything related to Russia; I thought I might become a chemical engineer and hardly suspected that the launching of sputnik in October 1957 would affect my life. College math soon soured my technical aspirations, and I began to study government (or political science) with the vague notion of entering government service. A course in comparative government with Sigmund Neumann, a German refugee who was a dynamic lecturer, piqued an interest in Soviet politics; his use of the concept of crisis also influenced my thinking in many respects. Three months in Europe in the summer of 1960 opened my eyes further to the importance of foreign language for the understanding of international affairs. Still, it was a rather sudden step to begin studying Russian my senior year. I was fortunate to have an excellent instructor, Vadim Liapunov, who whetted my desire to go to the USSR by stressing active use of the language, especially speaking. Russian was the first foreign language that I was certain would be useful. It was still considered rather exotic, and I was still bent mainly on preparing myself for government service, much influenced by the rhetoric of the Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960.
After graduation from Wesleyan, I went to Indiana University's intensive summer Russian program for second-year Russian, and when I failed to pass the foreign service exam, I decided to pursue an MA in history and Russian area studies at Indiana. By then I had become more confident that I could master Russian, much assisted by excellent instruction from several warm and cultured "little old Russian lady-teachers" at Indiana. My motivation was also reinforced by falling in love with my future wife, a Russian major of Slovak birth who was then secretary of the Russian Club. She says she noticed me because my Russian accent was so awful. Married in 1964, we spent most of our first year of marriage in Leningrad and Moscow as participants in the Soviet-American exchange of young scholars and graduate students. By then I had earned an MA and certificate of area specialization and was working on my PhD dissertation.
The year in the USSR was difficult in terms of living conditions—Leningrad was considered a "hardship post" and we lived in one tiny room in a shabby dormitory—but sharing such circumstances led to close friendships with the half dozen other Americans there. We also had varied experiences of "Soviet reality" aided by considerable travel within the USSR—Moscow and central Russia, Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine, and Central Asia—as well as much valuable study and research, including the purchase of several hundred books. In addition, we formed several warm friendships with Soviet citizens.
After finishing my PhD at Indiana in June 1966, I came to KU as assistant professor of history and Soviet area studies and have been here ever since. Our two children grew up in Lawrence. The four of us spent seven months in Moscow in 1971 while I was researching what became my third book. I have made three other, shorter, visits to the USSR in 1972, 1975, and 1993.
Besides teaching at KU, I have written extensively on Russian history and have presented papers at scholarly conferences all over the USA and in Canada, Britain, and the USSR. No doubt my best-known book is Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), which has been selected by several book clubs. My personal favorite is Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980) because I learned so much in researching it. I have also translated three books from Russian and written about twenty scholarly articles, more than thirty encyclopedia entries, and some sixty book reviews. The study of Russian history has given me great satisfaction and edification over many years. It is my firm belief that the study of history can be both entertaining and educational.
HIST 565 Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union