Alexander John Motyl
Олександр Джон Мотиль
Motyl at the Ukrainian cultural center in the library of the UKCentre,Donetsk,Ukraine in 2012
Born	(1953-10-21)October 21, 1953 (age 72) New York City,New York, United States
Occupations	Historian, political scientist, poet, writer, translator, and painter

Alexander John Motyl^[a] (born October 21, 1953) is an American historian, political scientist, poet, writer, translator, and painter. He is a resident of New York City. He is professor of political science atRutgers University inNewark,New Jersey, and a specialist onUkraine,Russia, and theSoviet Union.

He also writes opinion columns in publications such asForeign Policy,^[1]19FortyFive,^[2] andThe Kyiv Post.^[3]

Motyl's parents emigrated as refugees fromWestern Ukraine afterWorld War II, when the region wasoccupied by the Soviet Union.^[4] He was born in New York City on October 21, 1953.

He graduated fromRegis High School in New York City in 1971. He studied atColumbia University, graduating with a BA in History in 1975 and aPh.D. in Political Science in 1984.^[5]

Motyl has taught atColumbia University,Lehigh University, theUkrainian Free University, theKyiv-Mohyla University, andHarvard University and is professor of political science atRutgers University-Newark.^[6]

He is the author of eight academic books and editor or co-editor of over fifteen volumes.^[7] Motyl has written extensively on theSoviet Union,Ukraine,revolutions,nations andnationalism, andempires.^[8] All his work is highly conceptual and theoretical, attempting to ground political science in a firm philosophical base, while simultaneously concluding that all theories are imperfect and that theoretical pluralism is inevitable.

InImperial Ends (2001), he posits a theoretical framework for examining the structure of empires as a political structure.^[9] Motyl describes three types of imperial structures: continuous, discontinuous, and hybrid.^[10] Motyl also posits varying degrees of empire: formal, informal, and hegemonic. He discusses the Russian example in an earlier book,The Post Soviet Nations.^[11][12]

Motyl is also active as a poet, a writer of fiction, and a visual artist.^[8] A collection of his poems have appeared in "Vanishing Points".^[13] His novels includeWhiskey Priest (2005),Who Killed Andrei Warhol (2007),Flippancy (2009),The Jew Who Was Ukrainian,My Orchidia (2012),Sweet Snow (2013),Fall River,Vovochka (2015),Ardor (2016),A Russian in Berlin (2021),Pitun's Last Stand (2021) andLowest East Side (2022).^[8][13] He has done readings of his fiction and poetry at New York'sCornelia Street Cafe andBowery Poetry Club. Motyl has had one-man shows of his art in New York,Toronto, andPhiladelphia. His artwork is part on the permanent collections of theUkrainian Museum in New York City and theUkrainian Cultural Centre in Winnipeg.^[8]

Motyl is also a contributing editor to the national security publication19FortyFive. He is the 2019 Laureate of the Omelian and Tatiana Antonovych Foundation. According to Academic Influence, Motyl was ranked sixth among the “Top Ten Most Influential Political Scientists Today.”

In 2008–2014, he collaborated with formerAndy Warhol SuperstarUltra Violet on a play entitledAndy vs. Adolf, which attempted to explore the similarities and differences between Warhol and Hitler. Although two readings of the play took place, the work was never produced. Motyl subsequently described his working relationship with Ultra Violet in an essay in the magazine34th Parallel.^{[citation needed]}

In a review of his novelThe Jew Who Was Ukrainian, Michael Johnson wrote inThe American Spectator:

Protagonist Volodymyr Frauenzimmer was born of a rape at the end of World War II, when his mother was a Ukrainian Auschwitz guard who hates Jews and his father a Stalinist thug and Jew who hates Ukrainians. They married but lived in separate rooms and rarely spoke to each other... Alexander Motyl was clearly having great fun when he wrote his latest book,The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, a comic novel with half-serious historical underpinnings. It manages to amuse and challenge without losing its headlong momentum into the realm of absurdist literature.^[14]

Motyl has written favorably^[15] of the claims made byAlnur Mussayev^[16] and two other former KGB officers (Yuri Shvets and Sergei Zhyrnov) thatDonald Trump was cultivated and recruited by the KGB in 1987 to serve as a Russian intelligence "asset" (not an active "spy").^{[17][18][19][20]}

Academic books

• The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919-1929, (East European Monographs, no. 65; , 1980). ISBN(PDF). New York: Columbia University Press. 1980.ISBN 978-0-91471-058-5.
• Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR, (Cornell University Press, 1987).ISBN 978-0-80141-947-8
• Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (Columbia University Press, 1990).ISBN 978-0-23107-326-4
• Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism, (Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993).ISBN 978-0-87609-131-9
• Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities, (Columbia University Press, 1999).ISBN 978-0-23111-431-8
• Imperial Ends: The Decline, Collapse, and Revival of Empires, (Columbia University Press, 2001).ISBN 978-0-23112-110-1
• Ukraine vs Russia: Revolution, Democracy, and War. Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2017.
• Bits and Pieces: Fragmentary Memoirs. Amazon KDP, 2020.
• National Questions: Theoretical Reflections on Nations and Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Ibidem, 2022.

Editor

• Between America and Galicia: The Memoirs of Maria and Alexander Motyl. Lviv: Manuskrypt, 2019.
• The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Co-edited with Ksenya Kiebuzinski.
• The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, co-edited with Bohdan Klid, (University of Alberta Press, 2012).ISBN 978-1-89486-529-6
• Russia’s Engagement with the West: Transformation and Integration in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Blair Ruble and Lilia Shevtsova, (Routledge, 2005).ISBN 978-0-76561-442-1
• The Encyclopedia of Nationalism, 2 vols., (Academic Press, 2000).ISBN 978-0-12227-230-1

• Rutgers faculty bio
• Web site
• Motyl's blog atWorld Affairs Journal
• Alexander Motyl, "Back to Latin",New York Times, July 6, 2009

• Historians of Ukraine
• 20th-century American historians
• 20th-century American male writers
• Artists from New York City
• Living people
• 1953 births
• Scholars of nationalism
• Columbia College, Columbia University alumni
• Lehigh University faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• Rutgers University faculty
• Regis High School (New York City) alumni
• Historians from New York (state)
• American male non-fiction writers
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• American people of Ukrainian descent
• American political commentators
• Imperialism studies
• Historians of Russia
• Historians of the Soviet Union

• Articles containing Ukrainian-language text
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from April 2025
• Articles with hCards
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from December 2018