Mark von Hagen (1954–2019)

I met Mark von Hagen in September 1986, when I enrolled in Columbia University's PhD program. Studying with historians who were the titans of prerevolutionary Russian history, I found Mark, then a young assistant professor with a freshly minted PhD from Stanford, accessible to me in a way they were not. Calling them by their first names, for example, was inconceivable. But Mark was always "Mark," and he was the only professor who invited graduate students to his apartment. One of my most indelible memories of Mark is of him roaming the halls of the Harriman Institute for hours, masterfully playing the accordion during our annual Christmas parties. The weight of the heavy accordion seemed insignificant in his robust arms and given his gargantuan height.

Professionally Mark's achievements were vast. He was the recipient of grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was integral to the field of Russian and East European Studies. He served on too many editorial and professional association boards to name and was director of both the Harriman Institute at Columbia and the Melikian Center at Arizona State University (ASU). In 2008, he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) and during his presidency successfully changed the name to the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). This was not trivial, as I can witness; since the name was changed, far more non-Americans from countries all over the world now attend.

Mark was the consummate diplomat. He had a special gift for connecting people. He co-edited several volumes that were the results of conferences he co-organized. These volumes were not only important because of the exceptional scholarship of the articles in them; all of them brought together scholars from the West and post-Soviet countries, erasing the artificial barriers the Cold War had imposed. Mark was so ubiquitous, even as his health declined, that I cannot think of a single person in our field who did not know him personally.

As the Soviet Union began to collapse, Mark was one of the first to realize the importance of studying national minorities. Although they composed almost half the population of the Soviet Union, they had been barely studied in either the West or East. He learned Ukrainian and became a pioneer of the now booming field of Soviet nationality studies. One of his first contributions to this field was his seminal article "Does Ukraine Have a History?"¹ Whereas he, like others of his generation, was denied access to Soviet archives when working on his first book, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930, he relished the time he spent working in the archives of multiple countries for his many subsequent articles and second book, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918.² He managed to fuse his long-standing interest in the social and cultural sides of military history with his new interest in Ukraine. I recall a particular riveting presentation he gave at ASU, which he may not have had time to publish, on the ethnic politics of Ukrainians who had served in the Russian Imperial army and found themselves prisoners of war in Germany in 1918. Until he stopped writing, a year before his death, he had been unraveling the complicated and fluid political allegiances and ideological shifts of military leaders in Ukraine from 1917–20. He was, I believe, the only non-Ukrainian who served as president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies. His prominence in the field of Ukrainian history was such that the New York Times hired him to investigate whether Walter Duranty, given his rosy coverage of a time of famine in Ukraine, should have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.

In many ways, Mark was the quintessential 19th-century intellectual. He exuded charm, perhaps a legacy his Viennese mother bequeathed to him. He was even-tempered and eternally optimistic. He had a deep appreciation...