Robert V. Daniels
Encyclopedia
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 (1960) 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.
, 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. The next year he joined the United States Navy
, where he went through the V-12 Navy College Training Program
before being assigned as paymaster
on the USS Albany.
In 1945, Daniels married Alice Wendell. The couple remained together for over six decades, raising two daughters and two sons.
Daniels received his A.B.
in Economics
in 1946, graduating magna cum laude. He later received his M.A.
, and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University
, one of the pioneer academic programs in the field of Russian area studies. Daniels' dissertation on the Left Opposition
of Leon Trotsky
and Grigorii 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.
. From there he moved to the Indiana University
in Bloomington
, where he remained until coming home to the University of Vermont
(UVM) in 1956. Daniels remained at UVM as a professor of History until his retirement in 1988.
Daniels was the first director of the Area and International Studies program at the University of Vermont, serving in that capacity from 1962 to 1965. From 1964 to 1969 he was the chair of the History Department at UVM. He was also the director of the Experimental Program of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1971.
Daniels retired from the University of Vermont in 1988, assuming the title of Emeritus Professor.
As was the case with many historians of the Soviet period, Daniels became greatly interested in the process of development in Russia following the 1991 collapse of communism and authored several books on the topic. He also was a contributor of analysis on the changing situation in Russia to liberal magazines such as Dissent
and The Nation
.
In 1992, Daniels was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
(AAASS), the main academic society for scholars of Russia, Central
, and Eastern Europe
in the United States. He was a co-recipient of the AAASS award for distinguished contributions to Slavic Studies in 2001.
In 2004, Daniels was awarded an honorary Doctor of Law degree by the University of Vermont and the university created the Robert V. Daniels Award for Outstanding Contributions in the field of International Studies.
. He was elected to the Vermont State Senate
as a Democrat in 1973 from Chittenden County
and re-elected several times, serving in that capacity until 1982.
academic textbooks targeted to university undergraduates, Daniel contributed two important works of historiography
during the decade of the 1960s.
In The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Daniels revisited the origins of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in Russia, depicting the Bolshevik organization as a multi-tendency
organization from its inception through the assertion of full control by Joseph Stalin
during the collectivization campaign of 1929. "Fundamental changes were taking place in the movement during these years," Daniels argued, and therefore "present-day Communism must accordingly be regarded as the evolutionary product of circumstances." Such a view stood in opposition to the dominant totalitarian model of the day, which tended to depict the Soviet Union as monolithic and immutable without the exertion of external force.
In Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, published in 1967 at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Daniels returned to his vision of a multi-tendency Bolshevik Party. In this work, Daniels detailed the confusion and process of persuasion by Lenin over the party leadership which culminated in the insurrection of November 1917. As Daniels himself noted, his book was dedicated to showing the process by which the Bolsheviks managed to seize power at the center of the Russian empire, rather than examining the social background of the revolutionaries and their opponents, contributing factors in Russian society, or the nature of the revolution at the periphery of the empire, away from the urban center.
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.
Note: Some of these books were translated into other languages, such as Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Catalan.
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
and educator specializing in the history of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. He is best remembered as the author of two seminal monographs
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
on the history of Soviet Russia —The Conscience of the Revolution (1960) and Red October (1967) — and as author or editor of an array of widely used Russian history
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
textbooks which helped to shape the thinking of two generations of American college students.
Early years
Robert V. 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 ArmyUnited States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
, and Helen Hoyt Daniels. The Daniels family moved extensively throughout Bill's childhood, but he generally returned each summer to Burlington, Vermont
Burlington, Vermont
Burlington is the largest city in the U.S. state of Vermont and the shire town of Chittenden County. Burlington lies south of the U.S.-Canadian border and some south of Montreal....
, the town from whence his parents hailed and where his grandparents remained.
Daniels graduated from St. Albans school
St. Albans School
St. Albans School may refer to:*St Albans School, , an independent school in Faridabad.*St Albans School , an independent school in St Albans, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom founded in 948 AD...
in Washington, DC in 1943. The next year he joined the United States Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
, where he went through the V-12 Navy College Training Program
V-12 Navy College Training Program
The V-12 Navy College Training Program was designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in the United States Navy during World War II...
before being assigned as paymaster
Paymaster
A paymaster often is, but is not required to be, a lawyer . When dealing with commission payments on contracts dealing with large amounts of money , most banks in the United States are very wary of handling such large amounts of money...
on the USS Albany.
In 1945, Daniels married Alice Wendell. The couple remained together for over six decades, raising two daughters and two sons.
Daniels received his A.B.
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in Economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
in 1946, graduating magna cum laude. He later received his M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
, and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, one of the pioneer academic programs in the field of Russian area studies. Daniels' dissertation on the Left Opposition
Left Opposition
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January...
of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
and Grigorii Zinoviev in the Russian Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
up to the year 1924, was directed by historians Michael Karpovich
Michael Karpovich
Mikhail Mikhailovich "Michael" Karpovich was a Russian-American historian of Russia. Karpovich is remembered as one of the fathers of Slavic Studies in America.-Early years:...
and Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union...
. Daniels' dissertation was subsequently revised and expanded for publication as The Conscience of the Revolution in 1960.
Academic career
Daniels' first academic position was at Bennington CollegeBennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.-History:-Early years:...
. From there he moved to the Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
in Bloomington
Bloomington, Indiana
Bloomington is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County in the southern region of the U.S. state of Indiana. The population was 80,405 at the 2010 census....
, where he remained until coming home to the University of Vermont
University of Vermont
The University of Vermont comprises seven undergraduate schools, an honors college, a graduate college, and a college of medicine. The Honors College does not offer its own degrees; students in the Honors College concurrently enroll in one of the university's seven undergraduate colleges or...
(UVM) in 1956. Daniels remained at UVM as a professor of History until his retirement in 1988.
Daniels was the first director of the Area and International Studies program at the University of Vermont, serving in that capacity from 1962 to 1965. From 1964 to 1969 he was the chair of the History Department at UVM. He was also the director of the Experimental Program of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1971.
Daniels retired from the University of Vermont in 1988, assuming the title of Emeritus Professor.
As was the case with many historians of the Soviet period, Daniels became greatly interested in the process of development in Russia following the 1991 collapse of communism and authored several books on the topic. He also was a contributor of analysis on the changing situation in Russia to liberal magazines such as Dissent
Dissent (magazine)
Dissent is a quarterly magazine focusing on politics and culture edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin. The magazine is published for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc by the University of Pennsylvania Press....
and The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
.
In 1992, Daniels was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is a scholarly society dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe...
(AAASS), the main academic society for scholars of Russia, Central
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
, and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
in the United States. He was a co-recipient of the AAASS award for distinguished contributions to Slavic Studies in 2001.
In 2004, Daniels was awarded an honorary Doctor of Law degree by the University of Vermont and the university created the Robert V. Daniels Award for Outstanding Contributions in the field of International Studies.
Political career
Daniels was active in the Democratic PartyDemocratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
. He was elected to the Vermont State Senate
Vermont Senate
The Vermont Senate is the upper house of the Vermont General Assembly, the state legislature of the U.S. state of Vermont. The Senate consists of 30 members. Senate districting divides the 30 members into three single-member districts, six two-member districts, three three-member districts, and one...
as a Democrat in 1973 from Chittenden County
Chittenden County, Vermont
Chittenden County is a county located in the U.S. state of Vermont. As of 2010, the population was 156,545. Its shire town is Burlington. Chittenden is the most populous county in the state, with more than twice as many residents as Vermont's second-most populous county, Rutland.Chittenden County...
and re-elected several times, serving in that capacity until 1982.
Death and legacy
Bill Daniels died March 28, 2010. He was 84 years old at the time of his death.Scholarship
Although best remembered as the author and editor of a series of paperbackPaperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...
academic textbooks targeted to university undergraduates, Daniel contributed two important works of historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
during the decade of the 1960s.
In The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Daniels revisited the origins of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in Russia, depicting the Bolshevik organization as a multi-tendency
Multi-tendency
Multi-tendency when used in regards to a political organization, especially a left-wing or anarchist one, means that the organization recognizes or at least tolerates members who are affiliated with or identify with a variety of ideologies within the broad stance of the organization...
organization from its inception through the assertion of full control by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
during the collectivization campaign of 1929. "Fundamental changes were taking place in the movement during these years," Daniels argued, and therefore "present-day Communism must accordingly be regarded as the evolutionary product of circumstances." Such a view stood in opposition to the dominant totalitarian model of the day, which tended to depict the Soviet Union as monolithic and immutable without the exertion of external force.
In Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, published in 1967 at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Daniels returned to his vision of a multi-tendency Bolshevik Party. In this work, Daniels detailed the confusion and process of persuasion by Lenin over the party leadership which culminated in the insurrection of November 1917. As Daniels himself noted, his book was dedicated to showing the process by which the Bolsheviks managed to seize power at the center of the Russian empire, rather than examining the social background of the revolutionaries and their opponents, contributing factors in Russian society, or the nature of the revolution at the periphery of the empire, away from the urban center.
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
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
, presaged the work of a generation of younger political historians such as Stephen F. Cohen and the wave of social historians
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
who came to the fore in the profession of Soviet studies during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
Footnotes
See Hoffmann, Erik, P. 2011. "Robert V. Daniels," in PS: Political Science & Politics, Volume 44, No. 1, pp 156 - 160.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, MA: 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, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
- The Dynamics of Soviet Politics. With Paul Cocks and Nancy Whittier Heer. Cambridge, MA: 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, MA: 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 and 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.
Further reading
- "Letters of John Dewey to Robert V. Daniels, 1946-1950," Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 20, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1959), pp. 569-576.