Obituary

Alexander V. Prusin, 1955–2018

Our colleague and friend Alexander Victor Prusin died on August 13, 2018 at age sixty-three in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A prolific scholar of twentieth-century eastern and southeastern Europe, Prusin spoke Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian indifferently—not to mention his German, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and near-native English. Professor of history at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Prusin was actively involved on campus. His students found him strict but engaging; Prusin demanded excellence and punctuality, but beneath a tough exterior they discovered a warm heart, a passion for history, and a willingness to share anecdotes about growing up in the USSR.

Prusin completed his dissertation at the University of Toronto, and published an updated version as Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (2005). Prusin then turned to a longer chronological and geographical view in The "Lands Between": Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (2010). Prusin's subsequent project focused on the Balkans, leading to the well-regarded Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (2017). His most recent monograph, Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland, co-authored with Gabriel N. Finder, appeared in 2018 (at the time of his death he was working on a book entitled The History of the Balkan Wars for Oxford University Press). Readers of Holocaust and Genocide Studies remember his three articles here: "'Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!': The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946" (2003); "A Community of Violence: the SiPo/SD and Its Role in the Nazi Terror System in Generalbezirk Kiew" (2007); and "Poland's Nuremberg: The Seven Court Cases of the Supreme National Tribunal, 1946–1948" (2010). Prusin was an important figure in the shift of the field of Holocaust studies to the East. Among other prestigious awards, Prusin was a 2001–2002 Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Memorial Museum.

Since Alex was a personal friend and one-time gym partner, I cannot end without an intimate note. Alex was a serious film buff and a fun-loving, humorous companion. He was an athlete's athlete: I shuddered once as he recounted how many bones he had broken between the hockey in the USSR, teaching hand-to-hand combat during his stint in the Red Army, and the tennis, volleyball, wrestling, and other sports in North America and Europe. But nothing held him back, for he was an indomitable spirit.^*