Robert Vincent "Bill" Daniels (1926–2010) was an Americanhistorian and educator specializing in the history of theSoviet Union. He is best remembered as the author of two seminalmonographs on the history of Soviet Russia —The Conscience of the Revolution (1960) andRed October (1967) — and as author or editor of an array of widely usedRussian history textbooks which helped to shape the thinking of two generations of American college students.
Daniels, known to his friends and acquaintances by the nickname "Bill", was born on January 4, 1926, inBoston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Robert W. Daniels, a career officer in theUnited States Army, and Helen Hoyt Daniels.[1] The Daniels family moved extensively throughout Bill's childhood, but he generally returned each summer toBurlington, Vermont, the town from whence his parents hailed and where his grandparents remained.
Daniels graduated fromSt. Albans School inWashington, DC in 1943.[1] The next year he joined theUnited States Navy, where he went through theV-12 Navy College Training Program before being assigned aspaymaster on the USSAlbany.[1]
In 1945, Daniels married Alice Wendell. The couple remained together for over six decades, raising two daughters and two sons.[1]
Daniels received hisA.B. ineconomics in 1946, graduatingmagna cum laude.[1] He later received hisM.A., andPh.D. in history fromHarvard University, one of the pioneer academic programs in the field of Russian area studies.[2] Daniels' dissertation on theLeft Opposition ofLeon Trotsky andGrigory Zinoviev in theRussian Communist Party up to the year 1924, was directed by historiansMichael Karpovich andMerle Fainsod.[3]: viii Daniels' dissertation was subsequently revised and expanded for publication asThe Conscience of the Revolution in 1960.[3]: viii
Daniels' first academic position was atBennington College.[1] From there he moved to theIndiana University inBloomington, where he remained until coming home to theUniversity of Vermont (UVM) in 1956.[1] Daniels remained at UVM as a professor of history until his retirement in 1988.[2]
Daniels was the first director of the Area and International Studies program at the University of Vermont, serving in that capacity from 1962 to 1965.[1] From 1964 to 1969 he was the chair of the History Department at UVM.[2] He was also the director of the Experimental Program of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1971.[1]
Daniels retired from the University of Vermont in 1988, assuming the title ofemeritus professor.
As was the case with many historians of the Soviet period, Daniels became greatly interested in the process of development in Russia following the1991 collapse of communism and authored several books on the topic. He also was a contributor of analysis on the changing situation in Russia to liberal magazines such asDissent andThe Nation.
In 1992, Daniels was elected president of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the main academic society for scholars of Russia,Central, andEastern Europe in the United States. He was a co-recipient of the AAASS award for distinguished contributions toSlavic studies in 2001.[2]
In 2004, Daniels was awarded anhonorary Doctor of Law degree by the University of Vermont and the university created the Robert V. Daniels Award for Outstanding Contributions in the field of International Studies.[1]
Daniels was active in theDemocratic Party.[1] He was elected to theVermont State Senate as a Democrat in 1973 fromChittenden County and re-elected several times, serving in that capacity until 1982.[2]
Daniels died March 28, 2010. He was 84 years old.
Although best remembered as the author and editor of a series of paperback academic textbooks targeted at university undergraduates, Daniels contributed two important works of history during the decade of the 1960s.
InThe Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Daniels revisited the origins of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party in Russia, depicting theBolshevik organization as a multi-tendency organization from its inception through the assertion of full control byJoseph Stalin during the collectivization campaign of 1929. "Fundamental changes were taking place in the movement during these years," Daniels argued, and therefore "present-dayCommunism must accordingly be regarded as the evolutionary product of circumstances."[3]: 3 Such a view stood in opposition to the dominanttotalitarian model of the day, which tended to depict the Soviet Union as monolithic and immutable without the exertion of external force.
InRed October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, published in 1967 at the time of the 50th anniversary of theRussian Revolution, Daniels returned to his vision of a multi-tendency Bolshevik Party. In this work, Daniels detailed the confusion and process of persuasion by Lenin over the party leadership, which culminated in theinsurrection of November 1917. As Daniels himself noted, his book was dedicated to showing the process by which the Bolsheviks managed to seize power at the center of the Russian Empire, rather than examining the social background of the revolutionaries and their opponents, contributing factors in Russian society, or the nature of the revolution at the periphery of the empire, away from the urban center.[4]
Daniels' emphasis on the multi-tendency nature of the early Bolshevik organization, with its implications of multiple possible paths of development rather than an inherent road tototalitariandictatorship, presaged the work of a generation of younger political historians such asStephen F. Cohen and the wave ofsocial historians who came to the fore in the profession of Soviet studies during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.[5][6][7]
Note: Some of these books were translated into other languages, such as Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Catalan.
