Alexander Rabinowitch

Who is Alexander Rabinowitch?

Alexander Rabinowitch is Professor Emeritus of History,Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught from 1968 until 1999, and Affiliated Research Scholar, St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences since 2013.

Rabinowitch received his B.A. at Knox College, 1956; M.A. at the University of Chicago, 1961; and Ph.D. at Indiana University, 1965. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert on the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian civil war.

Upon publication, his best-known book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, was widely acclaimed by Western scholars as a major breakthrough in study of the Russian revolution. Initially, it was fiercely attacked by Soviet historians for its violation of mandatory canon. In 1989, during Gorbachev's perestroika, however, it became the first Western scholarly investigation of the Russian revolution to be published in the Soviet Union.