On February 7, 2009, a memorial service for Marc Raeff (1923–2008) took place in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University. In this issue of Ab Imperio, we publish eulogies and memoirs of him by his friends and relatives. We also asked Vladimir Berelowitch of l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, to offer his reminiscences of Marc Raeff.

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Marc Raeff was one of the pillars of American historiography of Russia. A student of Michael Karpovich, Marc Raeff brought to the study of Russia not just an exceptional breadth of knowledge of Russian history and culture but also a rare, by any standard, vision of the development of culture, state, and society of the Russian empire from a pan-European perspective. As Richard Wortman notes in the text published below, Marc Raeff laid the foundation for a contemporary understanding of the modern and westernized state in post-Petrine Russia. His works on the history of Russian bureaucracy, the ideology of cameralism, and the psychology of the Russian nobility have long been classics. Marc Raeff is no doubt well known to the readers of Ab Imperio as the author of classic articles on the imperial policies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. His book Understanding Imperial Russia is a unique example of a serious historical study that is read with pleasure by students and professors, specialists and the general public, all of whom derive serious insights from it. Marc Raeff is known to many as a scholar of the Russian post-revolutionary emigration as well. One can safely argue that he created emigration studies as a new field in Russian historiography. Over many years, he collaborated with and supported the New York Public Library and the Bakhmetev Archive at Columbia University. He also supported Novyi Zhurnal and actively published in it. Marc Raeff stood for the best characteristics of American Slavic studies: a genuine commitment to Russian culture, breadth of view, a lack of political partisanship, a deep and real professionalism, and intellectual independence.
Marc Raeff was not just a historian. Texts by his daughters and his colleagues allow us to see his multifaceted personality, his intellectual generosity, his tolerance, and his steadfastness. Many recall his sense of humor and at times acerbic remarks: reminiscing about his school years in France, he would suddenly smile and recall how his geography teacher, a Pole by origin, “disliked him both as a Russian and a Jew.”
To Raeff’s family memories of Russia were added the experiences of exile in interwar Germany and France. One of the few Europeans in American studies of Russia, he felt equally at home in European historiography and in the contexts of Russian, French, and German literature. Talking to Marc Raeff was invariably interesting because his view of the present and the past was always unusual and unpredictable, and his interest in history and contemporary culture was inexhaustible. Marc Raeff inherited (and possibly consciously cultivated) the Russian intelligentsia’s critical attitude toward the existing order of things. He would use Shakespeare’s “a plague on both your houses!” to comment on the richness of choice in U.S. elections.
Marc Raeff was always ready to share his encyclopedic knowledge of European history and culture, and he never refused a word of advice to his own or others’ students. He was a man of a different era, when letters were handwritten daily, and he never learned how to use a computer. The Ab Imperio archive contains one of these “old-fashioned” letters from Marc Raeff. We and colleagues of our generation, the people of a new, computerized era, sought his advice and were interested in his views and understanding of the past. We hope that the forum below will be not just a reminder of this remarkable person’s role in scholarship but will also underscore his significance beyond both American academia and Russian studies. We hope that new generations of historians of Russia worldwide will read his works, and that they will do so with the same interest his contemporaries did.
The editors of Ab Imperio are grateful to everyone who helped to prepare this forum. First, we would like to thank Alla Zeide for pointing out the existence of the written versions of these presentations and for facilitating their appearance in AI. We thank Richard Wortman and Samuel Ramer for permission to publish their texts, as well as Wladimir Berelowitch for agreeing to share his memories of Marc Raeff with our readers. We are deeply grateful to Marc Raeff’s daughters, Catherine and Anne, for their very personal reminiscences, which allow us all to see their father in ways that his colleagues and students could not see him. We would also like to thank Catherine Raeff for the photographs of her father from her family archive.