University Libraries receives Soviet scholar’s collection

Author: Megan Connelly

The 6,000-volume personal library of the late Alexander Dallin, one of the pioneers of Russian and East European studies in North America, has been donated to the University Libraries at Notre Dame. The collection is a gift from Dallins wife, Gail Lapidus, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.p. The author of numerous books and articles, Dallin is best known for his classic work on the German occupation of Russia during World War II, “German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945.” Published in 1957 and reprinted in 1981, the book won the prestigious Wolfson Prize for History. Among his later works were “Black Box,” about the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, and “The Gorbachev Era,” co-edited with national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, former Stanford provost and Notre Dame alumna.p. Born in Berlin in 1924, Dallin emigrated to the United States in 1940 and earned his undergraduate degree in social science from City College of New York and his masters and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University. After World War II, he began his career by working on the Harvard Interview Project, which used the testimony of refugees and emigres from the Soviet Union to study the Soviet system. Dallin went on to teach at Columbia as a professor of political science and director of its Russian Institute. In 1971, Dallin joined the faculty of Stanford, where he served as director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies.p. For several decades, Dallin was a member of virtually every important committee in his field. From 1984 to 1985 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he devoted himself to the revival of the social sciences in the former communist world. He helped to establish the new European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and ran the New Democracy Fellows Program, which brought students from the post-communist states to Stanford to do graduate work in the social sciences.p. Dallin died in July 2000 in California.p. The Dallin Collection includes journals and monographs that cover all aspects of Russian and Soviet history, politics and foreign policy. It also includes works on European history, particularly France and Germany, as well as American politics and foreign policy.p. _Contact: David T. Jenkins, associate librarian, University Libraries, Jenkins.31@nd.edu _ , 574-631-9036 p. __

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