By Professor Laurie Manchester
I met Mark von Hagen in September 1986 when I enrolled in Columbia University’s PhD program. Studying with historians who were the titans of pre-revolutionary Russian history, Mark, then a freshly-hired, young, assistant professor of Soviet history, was accessible to me in a way they were not. Calling them by their first names, for example, was inconceivable. But Mark was always “Mark” and he was the only professor who invited graduate students to his apartment. One of my most indelible memories of Mark is of him roaming the halls of the Harriman Institute for hours, masterfully playing the accordion during our annual Christmas parties. The weight of the heavy accordion seemed insignificant in his robust arms and given his gargantuan height.
Professionally Mark’s achievements were vast. He was the recipient of grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was integral to the field of Russian and East European Studies. He served on too many editorial and professional association boards to name and was director of both the Harriman Institute at Columbia and the Melikian Center at ASU. In 2008 he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and during his presidency successfully changed the name to the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies. This was not trivial, as I can witness; since the name was changed far more non-Americans from countries all over the world now attend.
Mark was the consummate diplomat. He had a special gift for connecting people. He co-edited several volumes which were the results of conferences he co-organized. These volumes were not only important because of the exceptional scholarship of the articles in them; all of them brought together scholars from the West and post-Soviet countries, erasing the artificial barriers the cold war had imposed. Mark was so ubiquitous, even as his health declined, that I can’t think of a single person in our field who did not know him personally.
As the Soviet Union began to collapse Mark was one of the first to realize the importance of studying national minorities. Although they comprised almost half the population of the Soviet Union, they had been barely studied in either the West or East. He learned Ukrainian and became a pioneer of the now booming field of Soviet nationality studies. Whereas he, like others of his generation, was denied access to Soviet archives when working on his first book, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930, he relished the time he spent working in the archives of multiple countries for his many subsequent articles and second book, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918. He was, I believe, the only non-Ukrainian who served as president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies. His prominence in the field of Ukrainian history was such that the New York Times hired him to investigate whether Walter Duranty, given his rosy coverage of a time of famine in Ukraine, should have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
In many ways Mark was the quintessential nineteenth century intellectual. He exuded charm, perhaps a legacy his Viennese mother bequeathed to him. He was even tempered and eternally optimistic. He had a deep appreciation and knowledge of high culture. He loved to travel and was an intellectual of broad breadth. He was a polyglot, who spoke flawless Russian. Yet at the same time, Mark was inherently modern and social. There was a lack of pretentiousness about him. He was devoted to social justice and human rights. A connoisseur of ethnic foods, one could imagine him at home in any culture. He was imbued with a deeply democratic spirit.
That democratic spirit contributed to his decision to leave an endowed full professorship at Columbia and join the faculty of the History department at Arizona State University as chair in 2007. Mark was proud of his father’s work as a public high school history teacher in Colorado. Dedicated to public education, he was eager to teach non-traditional and first generation college students who rarely, if ever, enroll at elite institutions. He thoroughly enjoyed teaching undergraduates and graduate students at ASU. He and Johnny, his loving husband, hosted countless parties and dinners for students and faculty in their beautiful home. On July 22 of this year Mark was too ill to physically attend the PhD defense of the final graduate student whose dissertation we co-directed, but he sent us seventeen pages of comments and was present by telephone, adding insight the rest of us hadn’t considered.
The last time I saw Mark, before leaving for Europe two weeks ago, I brought my seventeen year old son, Eli. When we arrived, Mark and Johnny, each with a dog in their lap, were watching news on a Spanish language TV station. Mark peppered Eli with questions about his plans to study genetics and recalled his own difficulties learning to drive a car. Eli so thoroughly enjoyed the visit that he told me afterwards that he wanted to regularly accompany me on my visits to see Mark and Johnny. Alas, future conversations with Mark will never be. But so many memories remain as he lives on in all who knew him. Спи спокойно, дорогой Марк! Sleep peacefully, dearest Mark!