Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
On Martin Malia (1924–2004)
By Stephen Kotkin
Martin Malia, who died on November 19, was one of the great historians of Russia, and he was much more than that. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1924, he became equally at home in Paris, where he lectured for decades and knew such scholars as François Furet and Raymond Aron; in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he befriended some of the great poets and dissidents of the twentieth century, among them Anna Akhmatova; in Warsaw and Kraków, where he sought out distinguished Catholic as well as secular thinkers like Adam Michnik; and in Berkeley, where he taught from 1958 to 1991, introducing generations of undergraduates and graduate students to European culture and the liberal tradition in politics. Conversations with him ranged across the intellectual and political history of the West. He talked with remarkable clarity about Pascal and Tolstoy, Thucydides and Hegel. With the slightest prompting, he unwound the stories and significance of medieval heresy and of absolutist monarchy, the breakthrough to liberty and, amid the urge for equality, the difficult advent of democracy.
Feature, 590 words
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