Alfred J. Rieber

Alfred J. Rieber (1931 – September 9, 2025) was an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history.

Biography He graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He obtained his MA (1954) and PhD (1959) from the Russian Institute at Columbia University. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Joseph Stalin and the French Communist Party in the 1940s.

He has taught at numerous prestigious institutions, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 30 years and was chair of the history department for ten years. He also taught for more than two decades at the Central European University (CEU), again chairing the history department for four years. He won several teaching awards throughout his career for excellence in teaching.

As a historian, he has published widely in the field of Russian and Soviet history. Among his notable books are Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge, 2014) which won the Bentley Prize of the World History Association and its sequel Stalin's Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia (Cambridge, 2016) which was shortlisted for the Pushkin Book Prize.

Rieber has also written three historical detective novels: To Kill a Tsar (2010); The Kiev Killings (2013); and Siberian Secrets (2014), all published by the New Academia Press.

Rieber died on September 9, 2025, at the age of 94.