Came the Revolution

Despite the recent February Revolution and the world war that was raging to the west, Moscow in the late winter of 1917 was not a very excited city. Michael Karpovich, a young army officer attached to a government bureau, felt no particular emotion as he walked down the street on a routine errand. When he happened to meet an old friend whom he had not seen for several years, Karpovich was more pleased than surprised. He would have been shocked indeed, had someone told him that this chance meeting would remove him from Russia for the rest of his life, and that it would eventually give him the title of Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at a place called Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The friend, who had known Karpovich when he was preparing for a history professorship at Moscow University and working for the Socialist Revolutionary Party, now had an unusual offer to make. The new provisional government set up under Alexander Kerensky had just appointed him as ambassador to the United States, and he wanted Karpovich to go along as his confidential secretary. Karpovich, however, said no. Indeed he said it again and again during the next two weeks, and finally agreed to make the trip only after his friend promised that they would return within a few months. "Don't bother to bring any heavy clothes," the ambassador advised. "Washington is warm in the summer, and we'll be back before winter."

Washington was warm during 1917, but things were decidedly hotter in Petrograd. On the night of October 24 Lenin and a well-organized group of Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and proclaimed themselves the new rulers of Russia. News of the revolt shocked the whole world, but it positively astounded the members of the Russian embassy in Washington. On the next day Karpovich himself decoded a cable from Trotsky, in which the Bolshevik leader said that if the diplomats there would recognize the new regime they might continue to represent Russia, but if not, would they please vacate the embassy so that new envoys could be sent?

Like almost everyone else in Washington, the Russian ambassador doubted that the Red government would last very long. On the advice of the U.S. State Department, he refused to recognize the new regime and refused also to abandon his mission. To each member of his staff, however, he gave the free choice of either returning home or remaining as part of the "embassy without a government." Karpovich, like all but one of the other representatives, decided to stay.

A small man with sparse hair and a bristly, rust-colored mustache, Professor Karpovich likes to reflect about that Moscow street meeting 38 years ago and the tremendous effect it has had on his life. Such reflection is precisely consistent with his theory of history, which holds that no event is inevitable and that any minute happening may profoundly change the world. Specifically, Karpovich tries to show the Western nations that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was not an "inevitable," unavoidable result of previous Russian history. He points out that there is no basic affinity between communism and the Russian national character, and that--as Lenin himself admitted--the October Revolution could never have succeeded if the war had not demoralized the country at just that time. Thus the fate of Russia, different today if a certain chance event--a "street meeting" of history--had not occurred in 1917.

But it has taken more than one such accident to transform Karpovich from the Moscow soldier-bureaucrat to the Harvard professor. Remaining in Washington in 1917, he and his fellow orphaned diplomats waited five years for the Soviet regime to collapse and then finally closed up their embassy. In 1922 Karpovich moved to New York, where he lived for several years as a writer and translator. This literary existence in expatriate circles might have continued indefinitely, but in 1927 occurred the second great accident of Karpovich's life: Harvard College's only instructor in Russian History suddenly left Cambridge in the middle of the school year. An acquaintance of Karpovich's on the Faculty recommended him to fill the vacancy, and on two weeks' notice he came and taught the course. He has been here ever since.

Russian History courses at the College have expanded considerably under Karpovich's 28-year tutelage, but he much prefers to talk about his own "historical expansion" during this period. As an Eliot House tutor ("I guess I'm still affiliated there") and a lecturer in the old History 1 course, he had to assimilate multitudinous facts in unfamiliar fields of history and meanwhile to make sure that he always kept one jump ahead of his students. Indeed, during the last war Karpovich took over the whole direction of History 1, and he still recalls the experience with an intellectual shudder. An incredibly broad survey that covered all history from the fall of Rome to the present, the course required a tremendous amount of factual knowledge from its lecturer and moved at a prodigious rate of speed. "Students used to say that if you looked out the window you could miss the French Revolution," Karpovich recalls.

The Professor's academic influence has not been restricted to the History Department at Harvard, however. Over the years his graduate students have scattered throughout the country and become prominent in many leading universities, so that now almost every Russian history expert in America is directly or indirectly a Karpovich protege. "He has virtually created a whole new school of historians," says a member of the Russian Research Center here.

Yet despite his influence and renown in the field of history Karpovich presently occupies a chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and he is probably best known at the College as lecturer in Slavic 150, a survey of modern Russian literature. The big change began about six years ago, when he was asked to teach a literature course and obligingly agreed--although his only qualification was that he had "read the books and liked them." Since then he has spent more and more time studying the nineteenth century authors about whom he lectures, but he still considers himself primarily a historian, and teaches at least one history course a term to prove it. "Academically speaking I have become a split personality," Karpovich explains--and then adds cautiously: "I hope not psychologically."

Ten Volumes to Come

Actually, Karpovich's most significant contribution to the knowledge of Russian history is yet to come. Although his writings to date have been mostly articles, he is currently planning, together with Professor George Vernadsky of Yale, to write a comprehensive ten-volume history of Russia covering the country's entire development from early times to the present day. Vernadsky is writing the first six volumes of the monumental project while Karpovich is scheduled to do the the last four, which will cover the years from 1800 on. When completed, the work will be the most comprehensive history of Russia yet published in English.

Though thoroughly initiated by now in the academic world, Karpovich is by no means estranged from the expatriate community that he left in 1927. On the contrary, he is a recognized leader of that community, and helps to mold its opinions through his editorship of the "New Journal," an anti-communist magazine published in New York. In addition he remains in personal contact with many of the New York Russians (Kerensky visited him in Cambridge last month) and often meets fellow exiles in various parts of the Western world. On his last visit to Paris, he relates, it seemed that at least half the taxi-drivers there were Russian expatriates.

As an authority on Russian history and a more or less direct participant in the events of 1917, Karpovich is often asked what he thinks of the present and future status of the Soviet Union. His usual answer is the vague hypothesis that the changes currently taking place in Russia, no matter how radical they seem, are merely part of a slow evolutionary process that is affecting the regime. But even with this careful answer, Karpovich scrupulously points out that he himself once spent five years waiting for the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik government, and that his opinions about modern Russia are therefore not worth very much. "I have been wrong so many times before that I prefer not to make any predictions now," says the man who left Russian 38 years ago and would not go back today, but who is nevertheless one of the world's truest representatives of his native land.