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Alexander Rabinowitch is Professor Emeritus of History,Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught from 1968 until 1999, and Affiliated Research Scholar, St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences since 2013.
Rabinowitch received his B.A. at Knox College, 1956; M.A. at the University of Chicago, 1961; and Ph.D. at Indiana University, 1965. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert on the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian civil war.
Upon publication, his best-known book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, was widely acclaimed by Western scholars as a major breakthrough in study of the Russian revolution. Initially, it was fiercely attacked by Soviet historians for its violation of mandatory canon. In 1989, during Gorbachev's perestroika, however, it became the first Western scholarly investigation of the Russian revolution to be published in the Soviet Union. Based on wide-ranging empirical research, the book stresses broad popular support for the Bolshevik program calling for peace, land, and bread and transfer of power to the soviets, as well as the party's tolerance of diverse views and its decentralized organizational structure in explaining its successful accession to power in October. In 2007, following decades of archival research and writing, Rabinowitch published The Bolsheviks in Power:The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. In this important study, praised by Western and Russian reviewers alike, Rabinowitch set for himself the twin goals of explaining how the Bolshevik party was relatively quickly "transformed into one of the most highly centralized authoritarian political organizations in modern history" and the rapidity with which the grass-roots egalitarian ideals that contributed immeasurably to its effectiveness in the struggle for power in 1917 Russia were subverted.
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