Faculty Profiles

One day in the spring of 1917, a young man working in the Czar's War Department at St. Petersburg went to his office at the usual nine o'clock, and stayed till the usual five. All during the day he had been hearing vague rumors of troop movements, and after dinner he decided to go to a friend's house to get some definite news. He started out the door, but before he had taken many steps, the noise of a machine gun split the air; so he went back into the house and suppressed his curiosity for that evening. The next morning he learned that a man named Kerensky had overthrown the Czar's government and set up a republic. He didn't bother to go to the office. At the age of twenty-nine, he found himself without a job.

Professor Karpovitch now lives in a house on Brattle Street with his wife and "symmetrical" family of two boys and two girls. A friendly combination of Babbitt, Charles Evans Hughes and Rudyard Kipling, he is one of the three or four greatest authorities on Russia in this country; one of the most loved and respected professors in Harvard University; and "the best tutor in the history department." Today, when he thinks back to that spring of 1917, he says, "For me, the Revolution was a very prosaic affair." He hadn't been unemployed many days before he ran into a friend named Bakmeteff, who had just been appointed Ambassador to the United States by Kerensky. Bakmeteff asked him to be secretary to the Embassy. They wouldn't be gone long. Six months, perhaps. This was in May. By November, Lenin had overthrown Kerensky and the Russian Embassy was left floating in Washington with no government to stand on. In 1922 the Embassy agreed to disband and each person went off on his own. Karpovitch was again without a job. He could have gone back to Russia, but he thought the Bolshevik movement would die out shortly. The bolsheviks lasted and Karpovitch, by remaining in this country, became an exile. During the next few years he lectured and translated where ever he could, still hoping to go back. He was living in New York without any special prospects, when something as sudden as had been the chance meeting with Bekmeteff happened to him. Archibald Coolidge, whom he had befriended at the Paris Peace Conference, asked him to come to Harvard and teach a course in Russian history which was being introduced into the curriculum. Professor Lord, who was originally to have given it, went into the Catholic ministry at the last minute. So with little more than two weeks' notice, and even less teaching experience, Karpovitch joined the Harvard faculty in the year 1927.

There is a certain magic about the way events shaped up in the life of the little Russian professor who lives on Brattle Street. He never intended to go into the diplomatic service. He never dreamed of becoming a Harvard professor. "The great changes in my life," he explains, "have always come very suddenly." What is it about this quiet, modest, kindly, thoroughly middle class gentleman that makes him one of the most unusual characters that has ever come to Cambridge?