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Michael Rywkin

Michael Rywkin

 

(1925-2022)

Professor Emeritus CCNY of CUNY and President Emeritus, Association for the Study of Nationalities.

Michael Rywkin- born in Poland, brought up in Poland, France, and Uzbekistan, started his university education at the Uzbek State University in Samarkand. He continued his studies at the University of Lodz ( Poland), and Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales (Paris, France), before completing his MA in international relations at CCNY and his PhD in Political Science at Columbia University. After teaching at Colgate and NYU, and a spending year as Research Fellow at Harvard, he joined the City College of the New York in 1963 as Professor and director of Russian Area Studies, and remained there until his retirement in 1993. Afterwards, he taught many summers at the University of Warsaw, joined the National Committee on American Foreign Policy as Central Asian Project Director, and took active parts in numerous domestic and international conferences.

From 1984 and until 1994 he was President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, guiding the organization through the most intense time, as the field of Soviet Studies was rapidly changing with geopolitical transformations in Eastern Europe. He served without interruption on the ASN Board and the Nationalities Papers Editorial Board for fifty years. He was the living memory of the ASN and will be sorely missed.

Prof. Rywkin’s  publications include Russia in Central Asia (1963), Moscow’s Muslim Challenge (1982), Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917 (ed. 1988), Soviet Society Today (1989), Moscow’s Lost Empire (1994), as well as over sixty articles in numerous publications.