Paul Avrich

Paul Avrich

1931–2006 ○ Natural causes

Historian who pioneered the history of Russian and American anarchism

Named a distinguished professor in 1982, his announcement quoted him: 'Every good person deep down is an anarchist.'

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Odessa, Avrich was a pioneering historian who spent his entire career teaching the history of Russian and American anarchism at Queens College. His Kronstadt, 1921 (1970) demolished the Bolshevik claim that the rebellion was a White-Guard conspiracy, and he later conceded that Getzler's muster-roll figures were more current than his own. He worked to recover anarchists as 'pioneers of social justice' rather than amoral and violent militants, and bequeathed a 20,000-item archive to the Library of Congress.