Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky (December 21, 1923 – May 14, 2011) was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of numerous books on Russian history. He was born in Harbin, Russian Manchuria to lawyer Valentin A. Riasanovsky and Antonina Riasanovsky, a novelist. Valentin was a Russian professor who taught at Moscow University, Harbin Normal University (China), and the University of Oregon, Antonia, a teacher and novelist who wrote under the pen name Nina Fedorova, was acclaimed for her work “The Family,” about the life of a Russian community in a Chinese city. It received The Atlantic Monthly Prize for fiction in 1940.

Nicholas Riasanovsky graduated from the University of Oregon in 1942. He received a Master's degree from Harvard University in 1947, and a DPhil. from St. John's College, Oxford in 1949 on a Rhodes Scholarship. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1949 to 1957, then at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1957 until his retirement in 1997. He specialized in the reign of Emperor Nicholas I (1825–1855).

Riasanovsky is best known for the best-selling textbook A History of Russia, first published in 1963. It is currently in its eighth edition (2010) (now co-authored with Mark D. Steinberg, a former student of Riasanovsky's) and has been acclaimed for its continued comprehensiveness.

Riasanovsky died in Oakland on May 14, 2011 at the age of 87.