Patricia McGahey (Pat) Herlihy, historian of modern Russia and Ukraine and cherished colleague and friend to so many of us, died on October 24, 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 88 years old, and had lived an amazing life.
Born in 1930 in San Francisco, Pat moved to China as an infant with her newly divorced mother. There Pat learned Chinese (her first language), German from her nanny, as well as English. In 1935, five-year-old Pat and her mother left China due to the growing threat of war with Japan, and returned to California. Pat spent the rest of her childhood and adolescence in San Francisco, where she attended Catholic schools, excelling in speech and debate. At 15, she caught sight of Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, who was in town for the 1945 U.N. Conference on International Organization. In the same year, she met her future husband, the medieval historian David Herlihy, at a high school debate tournament, which she won. In 1952, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in History, and married her high school sweetheart.
In 1954, Pat moved to Pisa, Italy with David and her nine-month-old son Maurice, the first of their six children, so that David could pursue medieval Italian studies on a Fulbright Scholarship. Pat loved her time in Italy, and learned to speak Italian fluently. It was the first of many extended stays that she and her family would make in Italy, for her husband's research and eventually for her own: it was by poking around, years later, in nineteenth-century records of grain shipments in the archives in Florence that she came up with the idea for her first book, a history of Odessa, tsarist Russia's port city on the Black Sea.
As Pat told it, she came to study Russian history on a lark. Her husband had begun his doctoral work in medieval studies at Yale in the early 1950s with an interest in Kievan Rus’, and he would bring home piles of books that she read and found fascinating. Disappointed when he decided to focus on medieval Italy, Pat decided to become a Russian historian. She taught herself Russian during lunch breaks at a factory job, and enrolled in the graduate program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her MA in 1960 and her PhD in 1963, while raising her (by then) four children with the help of her mother Irene. Pat was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Penn.
Pat did not have an easy time forging an academic career between the 1960s and 1980s. As a married woman, she was disqualified from jobs at institutions with strict policies of hiring only single women. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1964–1972) and Harvard (1973–1986), where her husband taught, spousal hires were unheard of. She loved to teach and excelled at it, and spent many years teaching adjunct courses and filling in for colleagues on sabbatical, as she researched and wrote her first book. She also delighted in motherhood and in traveling across Europe in the summers with her husband and their six blond-haired children, Maurice, Chris, David, Felix, Greg, and Irene, whom she referred to as the “Golden Horde.”
Pat did not spend much time complaining about the obstacles and prejudices she faced as a woman and mother in academia. She was very good at plowing on and succeeding in spite of them, and privately did much to help other women navigate the minefields. She often said how grateful she was to her mother and husband for supporting her ambitions and making her career possible. Her mother often stayed with the family to help care for the children, and David gave up his chaired professorship at Harvard in 1986 so that he and Pat could both accept tenured positions in the history department at Brown University.
Pat spent nineteen very happy years as a professor at Brown, teaching undergraduates (including myself) and graduate students. This was also a very difficult time for her personally: in 1991, she lost David, the love of her life and intellectual partner, to pancreatic cancer.
At Brown, Pat was beloved by her colleagues in the history department and legendary among us students for her engaging lectures, highly developed sense of irony, utter lack of pretentiousness, warmth, and good ideas. She taught imperial Russian, Soviet, and urban history, and in the early 1990s—ahead of the field's turn toward the study of religion—she introduced a revelatory seminar on religious diversity in Russia and the Soviet Union, over the objections from history department colleagues (who thought the topic irrelevant). Several of us who took this course and studied with her as undergraduates—Nicholas Breyfogle, Matthew Romaniello, and myself—would go on to write our first books about religious diversity and state policy in the Russian Empire.
The author of four books and numerous book chapters and articles, Pat was best known for her elegant first book Odessa: A History, 1794–1914. Published in 1987, it was the first history of Odessa written in any language. Originally published in English, it came out also in Russian and Ukrainian editions. Her main archival sources were hard won, gathered during a difficult six-month solo research trip to Odessa in 1985. This was the early Gorbachev era, before the fabled “opening of the archives.” Suspicious archivists at the State Archive of the Odessa Region told Pat there was no catalogue for the archive (not true), and she had to make do with the documents they selected for her to see. Stores were empty, food was scarce, and Pat said she would cry every night, she missed her family and home so much. Still, ever effervescent and resourceful, she made good friends among the city's devoted librarians, scholars, and kraevedy (regional experts) during this 1985 visit to Odessa, the first of many she would make over the years. Today Pat is a minor celebrity in Odessa, beloved in historian and kraevedy circles alike for her pioneering work on their city. Go to the “Odessika” room at the National Library in Odessa and mention Pat's name: librarians’ faces light up and they proudly point to her book, displayed in a glass case in English and its Ukrainian translation.
Pat called her book a “biography of the city,” but it is more than that. Odessa cut open a window onto the Black Sea and beyond for Russianists, who had long neglected the city and the sea. The book's pan-European framing was ahead of its time: she wrote it long before transnational, cross-regional studies won favor as a way to reveal historical processes that national framings cannot. Unusually for a study of Russian imperial history, the center of her story is not St. Petersburg but rapidly industrializing western Europe, whose voracious appetite for wheat, she argued, drove Odessa's astonishing growth in the nineteenth century from a little port into the Russian Empire's most cosmopolitan, polyglot city. Highly relevant today, Odessa is also a study of how migrants made and unmade a world-class city: drawn in by sudden opportunities and the city's first governors’ invitations to immigrate, they were later driven to emigrate by declining economic opportunities, narrowing definitions of citizenship, and growing intolerance for difference.
In 2005, Pat retired from Brown, and moved back to Cambridge to be closer to her family. Here, at age seventy-five, she began a fresh chapter of her life as a teacher and scholar. She taught Russian history for three years as Louise Wyant Professor at Emmanuel College in Boston, and was an active Associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute. She continued to write and publish articles and books, and in 2005 was awarded a prestigious Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship to support her research and writing. She took great pleasure in working on a new book project, a biography of the American diplomat and writer Eugene Schuyler, and had researched much of the book at the time of her death.
Pat's formidable gifts leave us all enriched, but we miss her terribly. What to say about the permanent loss of an irreplaceable friend and colleague? She was awesome, and we were lucky to know her.
Joel C. Moses, a leading American specialist on regional politics in the USSR and post-communist Russia, died on September 23, 2019 in Orlando, Florida as a result of complications from surgery. Joel entered the field at a time when social science methods were just beginning to be applied to the study of Soviet politics, and he was at the forefront of research devoted to the previously neglected areas of political institutions and behavior in the provinces. Using a combination of aggregate data on elite careers and local case studies, Joel explored the variations in personnel turnover in key regional party and state institutions, work that helped to dispel the image of a monolithic Soviet political system. Patterns of recruiting insiders vs. outsiders—natives vs. varyagi—to leading regional posts was a recurring theme in his work. He returned to this topic in his last article, published just months before his death, which was an ambitious examination of the continuities in center-periphery relations from Nikita Khrushchev to Vladimir Putin.
Joel's painstaking collection of material on regional elites and his encyclopedic knowledge of politics in Russian and Ukrainian provinces allowed him to make important contributions to related fields, most notably women's roles in politics, which was the subject of two of his books and an article in Comparative Politics. His research on women's political work in the USSR led him in turn to examine Soviet labor policy more generally, a topic that became a central concern of his research in the 1980s. In addition to his many books and articles on Soviet and post-communist Russian politics, Joel co-authored with his Iowa State colleague, Jorgen Rasmussen, later editions of the widely-used textbook, Major European Governments. In a recent tribute, Rasmussen called Joel “the most perfect embodiment of the professional scholar.”
A native of Toledo, Ohio, Joel went to Beloit College as an undergraduate because of its program in Russian Studies, much to the chagrin of his family, who had wanted him to remain in Toledo for college. After Beloit, he immediately entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied Soviet politics under John Armstrong. In 1971, while still working on his dissertation, Joel joined the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, which was his home institution until his early retirement in 2003 at the age of fifty-nine. During his more than three decades on the faculty at Iowa State, he held visiting appointments at Cornell, Stanford, UC San Diego, Wisconsin, and the European University in St. Petersburg, as well as Fulbright fellowships in Latvia and Slovakia. Joel had particularly fond memories of his 2008 stay in Bratislava, where he taught and consulted on curricular issues at the fledgling International School of Liberal Arts.
In order to spend more time with his sister and her children and grandchildren, with whom he would grow particularly close, Joel bought a beachside condominium in Ponce Inlet, Florida in the late 1990s. Four years later, he took the bold step of leaving Ames, Iowa for good and beginning what was in effect a second career in Florida. He taught courses on post-communist and Middle Eastern politics as an adjunct for several local universities, including Rollins and Stetson, and from his perch overlooking the Atlantic he continued his regular reading of Russian regional newspapers. During his sixteen years of “retirement” in Florida, Joel published ten articles in leading area studies journals on Russian regional and local politics.
Besides his research on Russian politics, Joel had three passions during his Florida years—his family, his red Corvette, and his volunteer work as a mentor in local schools. It will come as a shock to those who knew Joel only from conferences to hear that this distinctly un-flamboyant scholar drove a Corvette. He even joined the Ponce Inlet Corvette Club, though he was always a somewhat reluctant member. In his last years, Joel devoted considerable time to mentoring high school students in the Take Stock in Children program. His charges were talented students from backgrounds that made them unlikely to attend college. One of Joel's proudest moments came just a few months before his death, when a student he had mentored for several years enrolled at Williams College. It was a fitting final act in a life devoted to teaching and scholarship.
