Marc Raeff, one of the great Russian historians of his or any other generation, died in Teaneck, New Jersey, on September 20, 2008. He was born in Moscow on July 28, 1923, the only child of Victoria Raeff, a biochemist, and Isaac Raeff, an engineer. After living in Czechoslovakia, the family moved to Berlin, where Isaac monitored the export of German machinery to the USSR on behalf of the Soviet government. Refusing an order to return in 1931, they went instead to Paris, where Marc graduated from a French lycée, and then to New York in 1941. After a brief stint at City College, Raeff spent World War II as an army interpreter of prisoners of war. He earned a Ph.D. at Harvard under Michael Karpovich in 1950 and taught at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1949 to 1961.
Raeff spent the rest of his career at Columbia University, where he was named Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian Studies in 1973, retiring in 1988. There he was instrumental in the creation and development of the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia and also contributed significantly to the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library. He is survived by his wife Lillian, née Gottesman, a psychologist, and daughters Anne, a writer, of San Francisco, and Catherine, also a psychologist, of Indiana, Pennsylvania.
A bibliography compiled by Edward Kasinec, with Molly Malloy and Elliot S. Isaac, for a 1988 Festschrift, “Imperial Russia, 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition”, lists 276 monographs, translations, articles, and reviews from 1946 through 1987 in four languages in a wide range of publications; dozens more appeared in the following decades. While Raeff’s primary focus was eighteenth and nineteenth century Russia, his intellectual interests extended from Muscovy times to the twentieth century, always placing Russia in the broadest context of Western thought and culture. He rejected exclusive categories of any sort, once saying that he had “no identity” except as “a man and a European.”
Historians of Russia have long depended on Raeff’s seminal studies, whether of Michael Speransky, the origins of the Russian intelligentsia, the reigns of various Russian sovereigns, the well-ordered police states of Russia and the Germanies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the post-1917 Russian emigration, a field that he personally defined. Scholars in other areas of history and in other disciplines often have profited from his insights as well.
My first encounter with Raeff came in 1962. As a beginning graduate student at Columbia, I knew nothing about him or his work but was struck by his lecture in a general historiography course: “Institutional and Psychological Factors in Historical Research.” This opened my eyes to the way history could and should be enriched by literature, art, and the social sciences. In colloquia, seminars, and dissertation research, Raeff constantly challenged, encouraged, and supported me and his other students. He held us to high standards, commented on our work carefully and promptly, and taught us, as he put it in a letter published in “Kritika” in 2005, that good history means “what questions are asked,” not simply compiling material or blindly following established interpretations.
Raeff’s distaste for ideology, his impatience with pretence, and his incredible intellectual curiosity are legendary. When he first saw the Gateway Arch on a 1992 visit to St. Louis, his first comment was not about the beauty of Saarinen’s masterpiece but that it had been built solely as an aesthetic and symbolic statement, not for a political or economic purpose.
Those who persisted in his exacting apprenticeship were welcomed as equals; I still have a letter Raeff sent me after my dissertation defense with the salutation “Dear Colleague.” He and Lillian were gracious and generous hosts at their house in Tenafly, New Jersey, where students were treated as members of the family circle. Long after we graduated, Marc followed our lives and careers closely and went out of his way to help us any way he could.
In recent years, Raeff devoted himself to the Russian emigration which had shaped his early years. In a 2005 article he called it “a creative, lively emigration – a voluntary emigration that preserved and transmitted to most of its children, and their foreign hosts, the cultural values and achievement of prerevolutionary Russian culture.” This also could be said of Marc’s life and work, except that his were enlarged by an unusual insight into other cultures and disciplines. In 2006, he donated his professional library, over 3000 items, to Seton Hall University. Its range of languages, topics, and disciplines is one testament to Raeff’s career, but an even greater one is his impact on his students and the Russian and wider scholarly community. We were fortunate to have known him and are heartbroken he is gone.
Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr., St. Louis / MO
Zitierweise: Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr.: Marc Raeff (1923–2008), in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 57 (2009) H. 3, S. 472-473: http://www.oei-dokumente.de/JGO/Chronik/Schlaffly_Nachruf_Raeff.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)