Folks here at AK Press are saddened to announce the death of a great man, author Paul Avrich. Avrich was one of the best, and most prolific, chroniclers of anarchist history. His books—on such topics as Russian anarchism, the Modern School movement, Sacco and Vanzetti, Voltairine De Clerye, and the Haymarket martyrs—have the extremely rare quality of being both a pleasure to read and filled with valuable information. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize several times and received the Phillip Taft Labor History Award. He died last week at the age of 74.
Avrich was born in New York City in 1931. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1961 with a dissertation titled "The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees" in which he was one of the first modern historians to acknowledge the role of anarchists in the Russian Revolution. He went on to write several books on Russian anarchism, as well numerous groundbreaking studies and oral histories of anarchism in the United States. Of his book Kronstadt 1921, the New York Review of Books observed that "[Avrich] gives us the closest examination of all the available evidence that we are likely to have for some time and he uses his evidence to construct a narrative that, in its most brilliant passages, matches the power of Deutscher's The Prophet Armed and Moshe Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle." In a more personal vein, Ronald Creagh recently noted "I know that Paul’s friendliness will remain in the minds of all who have known him, just as his scholarship will be remembered by all who have read his remarkable books. He offers his readers very extraordinary information. Perhaps his most thought-provoking testimony is contained in his work Anarchist Voices, which is based on his careful, time-consuming interviews with hundreds of people."
The Paul Avrich Collection, over 20,000 manuscripts and publications on American and European anarchism, is housed at the Library of Congress.
AK Press mourns the loss of Paul Avrich and celebrates the contribution he made to anarchist scholarship. Just weeks before his death, we reprinted three of our favorite works by him: The Modern School Movement, Russian Anarchists, and an unabridged version of Anarchist Voices. We hope to make more of his books available in the future.
The AK Press Collective
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