Alexander Dallin

Alexander Davidovich Dallin (21 May 1924 – 22 July 2000) was an American historian, political scientist, and international relations scholar at Columbia University, where he was the Adlai Stevenson Professor of International Relations and the director of the Russian Institute. Dallin was also the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University, and served as Director for the Center for Russian and East European Studies.

Early life and education Dallin was born in Berlin, Germany, on 21 May 1924. He was the son of Menshevik leader David Dallin, a Russian revolutionary who had gone into exile from Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1921, The family then fled the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Another refugee from Germany, Henry Kissinger, was his classmate.

Early career and Columbia years During his graduate studies, Dallin joined the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. During 1951–1954, Dallin served as associate director for the Research Program on the USSR in New York.

In 1956, Dallin became an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. Dallin also served as a part-time consultant to the U.S. Government during much of the 1960s. His first marriage ended in divorce and Dallin married Gail W. Lapidus, a senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for International Studies and a professor of political science. He was a long-time member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and he helped re-energize the organization by bringing its headquarters to Stanford and served as its president from 1984 to 1985. Dallin had earlier been president of the Western Slavic Association from 1978 to 1980.

Interested in reviving the social sciences in post-Soviet Russia, in 1994, Dallin helped found the European University at Saint Petersburg. He also founded, with Condoleezza Rice, the New Democracy Fellows Program at Stanford. David Holloway and Norman Naimark edited a Festschrift in honor of Dallin, Reexamining the Soviet Experience: Essays in Honor of Alexander Dallin, published in 1996. Dallin formally retired in 1996 but continued to write, teach, and participate in academic activities. He died of heart failure in Stanford, California, on 22 July 2000, having suffered a stroke the day before. Holloway, who succeeded to the Spruance chair, subsequently said that Dallin was "the model scholar-organizer" and that he "had a profound and beneficial influence on the field of Soviet and East European studies. For him the study of the Soviet Union was not a question of confirming an already held point of view but rather a matter of seeking to understand a complex and changing reality."

Published works

German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (St. Martin's Press, 1957). Republished by Westview Press in 1981. Soviet Conduct in World Affairs. A Selection of Readings (Columbia University Press, 1960) [editor] The Soviet Union at the United Nations: An Inquiry into Soviet Motives and Objectives (Frederick A. Praeger, 1962). Diversity in International Communism: A Documentary Record, 1961–1963 (Columbia University Press, 1963) [editor, with Jonathan Harris and Grey Hodnett] Russian Diplomacy and Eastern Europe, 1914–1917 (King's Crown Press, 1963) [with others] The Soviet Union and Disarmament (Frederick A. Praeger, 1964) [with others] Politics in the Soviet Union: Seven Cases (Harcourt Brace, 1966) [editor, with Alan F. Westin] Soviet Politics since Khrushchev (Prentice Hall, 1968) [editor, with Thomas B. Larson] Political Terror in Communist Systems (Stanford University Press, 1970) [with George W. Breslauer] Women in Russia (Stanford University Press, 1977) [editor, with Dorothy Atkinson and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus] Black Box: KAL 007 and the Superpowers (University of California Press, 1985). The Gorbachev Era (Stanford Alumni Association, 1986) [editor, with Condoleezza Rice] U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures, Lessons (Oxford University Press, 1988) [editor, with Alexander L. George and Philip J. Farley] Between Totalitarianism and Pluralism: Articles on Russian and Soviet History, 1500–1991 (Garland Publishing, 1992) [editor] The Nature of the Soviet System (1992) [editor] Odessa, 1941–1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule (Center for Romanian Studies, 1998) The Soviet System in Crisis (Westview Press, 1991); republished as The Soviet System: From Crisis To Collapse (Westview Press, 1994) [editor, with Gail W. Lapidus] Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives (Yale University Press, 2000) [editor, with F. I. Firsov] The Uses of History: Understanding the Soviet Union and Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) [collection of essays, edited by Gail W. Lapidus]