Word: karpovich
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...