Russian Studies Workshop

Alex Rabinowitch received his B.A. from Knox College, his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He 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. Most of Alex’s historical research and writing has focused on the revolutionary and civil war eras in Russian history. A specialist on the political and social history of the revolution, he is the author of Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana University Press, 1968), The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The 1917 Revolution in Petrograd (Norton, 1976), and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana University Press, 2007). 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 research and publication project is a book titled The Bolsheviks Survive: Government and Crises in Civil War Petrograd.

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.