Richard Stites

Richard Thomas Stites (born December 2, 1931 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † March 7, 2010 in Helsinki ) was an American historian and specialist in the history of the Soviet Union and Russia .

Life

After attending school, Stites studied history at the University of Pennsylvania , graduating in 1956 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA History). A subsequent postgraduate studies of European history at George Washington University , he finished 1959 with a Master of Arts (MA European History), before 1968 for a dissertation on the role of women in the time of Tsar Alexander II. A Philosophiae Doctor (Ph. D.) in Russian History from Harvard University at the chair of Richard Pipes .

Stites was initially a teacher at the US Army's Russia Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and in 1977 accepted a professorship for Russian history at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University . He worked there until his death and also received a Guggenheim scholarship in 1983 .

In addition to his teaching activities, Stites published numerous specialist books on the history of the Soviet Union and Russia, but also on topics such as Russian nihilism , the role of women in Soviet society and Russian popular culture . His most famous works include:

• The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (1978)
• Bolshevik Culture (1985)
• Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1989)
• Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (1992)
• Mass Culture in Soviet Russia (1995)
• Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (1995)
• A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (2004)
• Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (2005)

At the time of his death, he was most recently working on the book The Four Horsemen: Revolution and the Counter-Revolution in Post-Napoleonic Europe, about the transnational entanglements of the four revolutions between 1820 and 1825 in the kingdoms of Spain, the two Sicilies, and the emerging Greece in the Russian Empire.

Web links

• Richard Stites in the nndb (English)
• Biography on the Georgetown University homepage
• THE NEW YORK TIMES: Richard Stites, Historian of Russian Culture, Dies at 78 (March 12, 2010)
• THE WASHINGTON POST: Richard Stites, Georgetown historian of Russian culture, dies at 78 (March 26, 2010)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Google Books)
2. ↑ http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensions/2015-1-076