Marc Raeff, Russian History Scholar, Dies at 85
HNN Editor: A reader of HNN, David McDonald, has sent along an email indicating that the Times obituary omitted important contributions made by Professor Raeff.
Email from David McDonald
While the obituary touches on most of the salient elements of his career as a scholar of Russian thought and the Russian emigration, it neglects other memorable elements in his life. In addition to Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, Raeff published two enormously important books. His M. M. Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957) used the life and times of the famous reformer as an entree to the institutional and intellectual history of early nineteenth-century Russia, including a deeply insightful portrayal of Alexander I, much more sympathetic than many other treatments; even more, his Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1983), remains an unaccountably overlooked masterpiece of comparative history, tracing the roots of enlightened absolutism in Prussia, Austria, Russia and elsewhere to the codification in theories of the Polizeistaat the administrative and revenue-extracting practices of central European states during the maelstrom of the Thirty Years' War. Distinguished by his legendary erudition--and representing one of the very earliest English-language works to engage Foucault, among others, this work provided a conceptual genealogy for the imperial Russian order that took shape in the eighteenth century; its portrayal of the state's"gaze"--not a term he'd use--offers an instructive viewpoint on the re-emergent and increasingly self-assertive state of the current dispensation in post-Soviet Russia. In addition, down to the last year of his life, Raeff participated avidly in debate and discussion among Russianists and dix-huitiemistes alike, contributing reviews and essays to a wide variety of journals on both sides of the Atlantic, all marked by his ability to distill the essence of arguments and complex concepts in a lapidary prose that combined impact with concision, always leavened by a wry or mordant humour.The obituary also neglects entirely Raeff's extraordinary impact as a trainer of several generations of graduate students, most of whom went on to shape the writing of Russian history in North America and Europe. To name only a few, Gregory Freeze, Elise Kimerling-Wirtschafter, John LeDonne, and the late W. Bruce Lincoln, along with dozens of us who passed through the Columbia graduate program, benefited from the insistence on rigor, intellectual breadth, attention to the interface between societies and the institutions set above them, and great generosity of spirit that Raeff brought to the seminar room, and in mentoring younger colleagues. If sometimes imposing, especially when critiquing the stylistic or evidentiary shortcomings of research papers, he also managed to communicate to all of us his thoroughgoing dedication to the production of good Russian history, to be sure, but above all to the craft of history itself. Along with his wife Lilli, who survives him, Raeff also welcomed not a few of his students to his home in Tenafly, New Jersey, hosting dinners populated by family and other guests, suffused with warmth, offering free-ranging conversation on issues elevated and mundane, and a great deal of laughter--not all of which one might immediately have expected from the elegantly turned-out and slightly daunting teacher. As much as his considerable and enduring scholarly contributions, his one-time students and his many friends and admirers throughout the world constitute a fitting legacy to his life.