Robert Vincent Daniels

Robert Vincent "Bill" Daniels (1926–2010) was an American historian and educator specializing in the history of the Soviet Union. He is best remembered as the author of two seminal monographs on the history of Soviet Russia —The Conscience of the Revolution and Red October (1967) — and as author or editor of an array of widely used Russian history textbooks which helped to shape the thinking of two generations of American college students.

Biography

Early years Daniels, known to his friends and acquaintances by the nickname "Bill", was born on January 4, 1926, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Robert W. Daniels, a career officer in the United States Army, and Helen Hoyt Daniels. The Daniels family moved extensively throughout Bill's childhood, but he generally returned each summer to Burlington, Vermont, the town from whence his parents hailed and where his grandparents remained.

Daniels graduated from St. Albans School in Washington, DC in 1943. Daniels' dissertation on the Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in the Russian Communist Party up to the year 1924, was directed by historians Michael Karpovich and Merle Fainsod. Daniels' dissertation was subsequently revised and expanded for publication as The Conscience of the Revolution in 1960.

Daniels' emphasis on the multi-tendency nature of the early Bolshevik organization, with its implications of multiple possible paths of development rather than an inherent road to totalitarian dictatorship, presaged the work of a generation of younger political historians such as Stephen F. Cohen and the wave of social historians who came to the fore in the profession of Soviet studies during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Works

Theses and dissertations "Current Developments in Union Wage Policy." Harvard University, A.B. Honors Thesis, 1945. "The Left Opposition in the Russian Communist Party, to 1924." Harvard University, Ph.D. dissertation, 1950.

Books The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960. A Documentary History of Communism. (Editor.) New York: Random House, 1960. The Nature of Communism. New York: Random House, 1962. Russia. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964. Understanding Communism. Syracuse, NY: L.W. Singer Co., 1964. Marxism and Communism: Essential Readings. (Editor.) New York: Random House, 1965. The Stalin Revolution: Fulfillment or Betrayal of Communism? (Editor.) Boston: D.C. Heath, 1965. Studying History: How and Why. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966. Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967. The Russian Revolution. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of Soviet Totalitarianism. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1972. Fodor's Europe Talking: A Guide to Nineteen National Languages. New York: David McKay, 1975. Office Holding and Elite Status in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976. The Dynamics of Soviet Politics. With Paul Cocks and Nancy Whittier Heer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976. The Militarization of Socialism in Russia, 1902-1946. Washington, DC: The Wilson Center, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1985. Russia: The Roots of Confrontation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985. Communism and the World. London: Tauris, 1985. Is Russia Reformable? Change and Resistance from Stalin to Gorbachev. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968. New York: Basic Books, 1989. The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of the Totalitarian Era. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1990. Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. The University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years. Hanover, NH: University of Vermont, 1991. The End of the Communist Revolution. London: Routledge, 1993. Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1995. Russia's Transformations: Snapshots of a Crumbling System. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. The Fourth Revolution: Transformations in American Society from the Sixties to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2006. The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. In Russian, 2011. Note: Some of these books were translated into other languages, such as Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Catalan.