In Memoriam: Daniel Brower (1936–2007)

When a mind is as fertile and alive as was Daniel Brower's, it is even more tragic to lose it in the prime of its continuing contribution. My memory tells me that I met Dan in 1968 when as a newly minted Ph.D. I traveled out to Oberlin, Ohio, to interview for my first job. Dan was just leaving Oberlin for the University of California, Davis, where he would spend the next 38 years of his career. He was my host and mentor as I tried to convince the suspicious faculty and discerning students of that earnest little institution that I was the right replacement for their tall, gaunt, erudite historian of Russia. First impressions last. Sometimes a book can be told from its cover. The man I met was sophisticated in a way that Ohio did not seem to be to this easterner, Philadelphia-born and New York–educated. When I asked whether one could receive the newspaper every day there, he knew I meant the New York Times. Moreover, his wife was French!

Dan Brower was born in the Depression and died in a rather depressing period of American history, but his energy and intellectual curiosity, his sense of the ironic, and his love for the discipline of history and the field of Russian Studies kept him going even through devastating losses and merciless illness. He studied at Columbia under Alex Dallin, where he wrote a dissertation, not on Russia but on the French Communist Party—his first book The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front.¹ This was a political–institutional study of the party and French politics that argued that the Communists in France never successfully freed themselves from national political traditions. Ideology, and even subservience to the Comintern, was trumped by the political values and institutions of France. The need to preserve social calm often overwhelmed the call of workers for social justice. Yet the party fused the ideals of Jacobinism, at least as loosely understood at the time, with notions of proletarian revolution, and in that amalgam a new jacobinism emerged.

Dan was extraordinarily restless intellectually, and he soon turned from France back to Russia. His puckish iconoclasm, while not quite radical revisionism, was evident in his odyssey from 19th-century intellectuals through Russian urban history to the deserts of Central Asia. He tried his hand at intellectual history, labor history, urban history, and the study of ethnicity, borderlands, and empire. His very eclecticism enriched his studies, even as his colleagues wondered where he would land next. Already in 1965–66 he was exploring the education of Russian populist revolutionaries as an exchange student in Leningrad and Moscow. It turns out that I, too, spent that year in Russia, and we must have met. Perhaps that led him to recommend me to Oberlin. But he was primarily based in the old capital while I was in the new, and for a time in Armenia, and my memory of that year does not include him. So much for reliance on that part of the brain as a historical source!

From that initial year in the USSR, he published his ruminations on the Russian intelligentsia in Slavic Review—and then his second book, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia.² The book was written over the decade in which the American student movement rose to its greatest influence and radicalism and fell just as precipitously once the military draft was abolished and the U.S. war against Vietnam collapsed. As in his first book, so in his second, Dan eschewed ideology as a principal explanation. Rather, he argued, a "school of dissent," by which he meant the radical community of young people alienated from the tsarist order and—for some but not all—their parents, was the primary cause of the massive recruitment of young people into the revolutionary movement of the 1870s. His study of a radical generation proposed that a counter-society had formed that protected and supported its members and provided them with a lifestyle and a set of ideals. Reason was...