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ABSTRACT
Geroid Tanquary Robinson (1892–1971) was a pioneering scholar of Russian studies in the United States. As founder of Columbia University’s Russian Institute (now Harriman Institute) Robinson created one of the premier centers for the study of Russian and the Soviet Union and, in the process, set in place a model for area studies programs that would be widely emulated. This article traces Robinson’s biography and intellectual influences, while outlining his contributions to the field of Russian studies.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The two most comprehensive biographical sources on Robinson are John Shelton Curtiss, “Geroid Tanquary Robinson,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), xi-xx; and Robert F. Byrnes, “Geroid T. Robinson: Founder of Columbia University’s Russian Institute,” in A History of Russian and East European Studies in the United States: Selected Essays (Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1994), 199-216. Specific biographical data is drawn from these two sources unless otherwise specified.
2. Geroid Tanquary Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932 and1957), 48.
3. As early as 1913, Robinson had written a school paper on the impact of Karl Marx on American socialism. David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25-26.
4. Traces of Robinson’s campus activities can be found on the pages of the Stanford newspaper, The Daily Palo Alto, which is digitized and searchable. See https://archives.stanforddaily.com/ (accessed August 9, 2021).
5. The Daily Palo Alto, October 26, 1917, 1.
6. Geroid T. Robinson, “Collective Bargaining in Politics,” The Dial, July 26, 1919, 48-50.
7. In one article Robinson discusses the “skirmish” at Tulsa. Although the violence resulted in the wholesale destruction of a thriving African American community, Robinson views it primarily as an instance in which African Americans justifiably resisted a threatened lynching. “The people of this country have planted hatred and violence among the Negroes,” he wrote, “and now at last the crop is beginning to come in. If we do not like the harvest, it is high time we began another seeding.” Robinson, “The Skirmish at Tulsa,” (June 5, 1921) The Freeman Book: Typical Editorials, Essays, Critiques, and Other Selections from the Eight Volumes of the Freeman 1920-1924, ed. A. J. Nock (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924), 54-57.
8. Geroid T. Robinson, “Russia Reexamined,” The Freeman, April 21, 1920, 130-133.
9. Mogilat would stay at Columbia until 1965. For her recollections of teaching Russian at Columbia in the 1920s see, Marian Moore Coleman, “Twenty-five Year of Teaching Russian at Columbia,” The Russian Review 6, no. 1 (Autumn, 1946): 84-90. She does not specifically mention having Robinson as a student.
10. “Col. Um Talks,” Stanford Quadrangle, August 20, 1920, 2.
11. Robinson, Rural Russia, viii.
12. For example, the image Robinson paints in one of his most famous chapters entitled “The Hungry Village” of a peasantry living on the margins of subsistence and falling deeper and deeper into poverty, has been questioned by a number of authors from the 1970s onward. See Stephen Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends, and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (1994): 41-75; Boris Mironov, “New Approaches to Old Problems: The Well-Being of the Population of Russia from 1821 to 1910 as Measured by Physical Stature,” Slavic Review 58, no. 1 (1999): 1-26; James Y. Simms Jr., “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review 36, no. 3 (1977): 377-398. Robinson’s account of the origins of serfdom has almost certainly been superseded by the work of Richard Hellie and the numerous historians writing in his wake. See Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
13. For example, Robinson argues that peasant agrarian disorders were caused not by agitators and ideology, but by the real hunger and deprivation that peasants faced in their daily lives. See Robinson, Rural Russia, 144-145.
14. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Robinson, at one point, expresses a frustration with the inability of data-driven generalization to convey reality as actually experienced by real people. “The statistics on the death-rate in the villages – what empty things they are, unless one remember a certain village near Tambov, a certain house with broken windows and rotted thatch, and the sound of wailing that went on all night,” Rural Russia, 117.
15. Curtiss, “Geroid Tanquary Robinson,” xv-xvi.
16. Atlanta Constitution, April 15, 1934, 4K
17. Byrnes, “Geroid T. Robinson,” 203.
18. Engerman, Know your Enemy, 27.
19. For a detailed analysis of the work of the USSR Division of the OSS see, Betty Abrahamsen Dessants, “Ambivalent allies: OSS’ USSR division, the state department, and the bureaucracy of intelligence analysis, 1941–1945,“ Intelligence and National Security 11, no. 4, (1996) 722-753, doi:10.1080/02684529608432388.
20. Dessants, “Ambivilent Allies,” 723. Langer in his memo was lavish in his praise of Robinson, referring to him as one of America’s “most outstanding experts on Russia” and the Research and Analysis Branch’s “best political brain.”
21. Bynes, “Geriod T. Robinson,” 206.
22. “Russian Institute Announced at Columbia Following Rockefeller Institute Gift of $250,000,” New York Times, June 20, 1945, 25.
23. Robinson Papers, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 4, “Letter from Dr. Hardin.”
24. On the Harvard Russian Research Center, see Engelman, Know your Enemy, 43-70.
25. “The House on 117th St: 40 Russian Specialists ‘Ripening’,” Washington Post, April 13, 1947, B6. The brownstone between Amsterdam Ave and Morningside Drive in which the Russian Institute was housed was demolished in the late 1960s to make way for Columbia’s International Affairs Building.
26. Robert F. Byrnes, “Harvard, Columbia, and the CIA: My Training in Russian Studies,” Russian History 15, no. 1 (1988): 103.
27. C. T. Evans, “Notes on Thomas T. Hammond,” https://www.ctevans.net/Historians/Hammond.html (accessed August 12, 2021).
28. Byrnes, “Harvard, Columbia, and the CIA,” 103-104.
29. Roger Adelson, “Interview with Theodore Von Laue,” Historian 58 (1995): 1-14.
30. Other prominent graduates include: Michael Boro Petrovich (History), Charles McLane (Political Science), Rufus Matheson and Deming Brown (Literature), Jane Chapman, David Granick, Hans Heymann (Economics). See Samuel H. Baron, “Recollections of a Life in Russian History,” Russian History 17, no. 1 (1990): 35.
31. Engerman, Know your Enemy, 32.
32. Danilov’s fundamental work Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaya derevnia was published in 1977. An earlier project on the history of collectivization directed by Danilov, had been approved for publication in 1964 but was immediately withdrawn when Khrushchev was removed from office. When Danilov’s work was published in English during perestroika it was entitled Rural Russia under the New Regime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) – an obvious nod to Robinson. See Robert E. Johnson, “The Greatest Russian Tragedy of the 20th Century”: An Interview with Viktor Danilov (1925–2004),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 2 (2008): 345-371.
33. Curtiss, “Geroid Tanquary Robinson,” xx.
34. Byrnes, “Harvard, Columbia and the CIA,” 104.
35. Samuel H. Baron, “Recollections of a Life in Russian History,” 35-36.
36. “An Interview with Alfred J. Rieber,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 2 (2009), 229.
37. Robinson’s relations with Florinsky were particularly difficult. He appears to have done everything in his power to keep his colleague out of the Russian Institute. As early as 1933, he had admitted in a letter to Samuel Harper, “Florinsky just happens to get on my nerves, so the less I say on that subject the better.” Norman E. Saul, Friends or Foes? The United States and the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 192. It was also said that Robinson did not allow Florinsky to teach in the Russian Institute, because he doubted that Florinsky, whose parent had been killed by the Bolsheviks, could be impartial, Byrnes, “Geroid T. Robinson,” 207. Florinsky’s appointment at Columbia was in the economics department, which presumably insulated him from Robinson’s influence.
38. Terence Emmons, “Kliuchevskii’s Pupils,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 118-45.
39. Jared S. Ingersoll, “Columbia University Libraries’ Slavic and East European Collection: A Preliminary History at 100 years,” in Russian and East European Books and Manuscripts in the United States, ed. Tanya Chebotarev and Jared S Ingersoll (New York: Haworth Information Press, 2003), 81; Byrnes, “Geroid Tanquary Robinson,” 209.
40. Ingersoll, “Columbia University Libraries’ Slavic and East European Collection,” 81-82.