SUMMARY:

In his essay dedicated to the memory of Marc Raeff, Wladimir Berelowitch recounts Raeff's European scholarly and intellectual pathways. Berelowitch notes that immersion in the pan-European historical perspective made possible Raeff’s breakthrough study, The Well-Ordered Police State. Berelowitch also traces Raeff’s impact on the development of studies of Russian history in Europe, primarily in France, and situates him in the context of the Russian emigration in Europe. Berelowitch explains that Raeff offered a new way of writing the history of a state through focusing on the biographies of its most important representatives. This was coupled with his other main theme, the intellectual development of Russian society. Synthesizing two themes and two approaches, Raeff developed a method of social-cultural analysis of state agencies and intelligentsia and grounded it in the context of European intellectual and institutional history. In this sense, while Raeff followed the tradition of Russian prerevolutionary historiography, he also revised it by introducing longue durée cultural and structural perspectives.