CEU and the Department of Historical Studies mourn the passing of University Professor Emeritus Alfred J. Rieber (1931-2025). Prof. Rieber was a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague who shaped the department, as well as the field of Russian and Soviet history.
Al joined CEU in 1995 after retiring from a successful career at the University of Pennsylvania. He was chair of the History Department from 1995 through 1999 and a member of the CEU Senate. Hardly a placid retirement plan, he devoted himself to developing a new and malleable institution into an internationally recognized university. Under his leadership, the Ph.D. program emerged, and the department gained its well-known comparative profile. Even after retiring – for the second time in 2008 – he remained a profoundly committed member of the university community, never ceasing to think and act constructively in the interest of its well-being. As the citizens of Budapest marched down Nádor utca in April 2017, Al cheered from his office balcony in support.
After exiting the classroom, he wrote five monographs and many essays, book chapters, and reviews, including Stalin as Warlord (2022), The Imperial Russian Project (2017), Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia (2015, short-listed for Pushkin Prize 2016), and Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands (2014, Winner of World History Bentley Prize 2015). His scholarship spanned all eras, ranging from the nineteenth-century Great Reforms to World War II to the French Communist Party. He pushed the field to reconsider the persistent themes of Russian statecraft and the role of the borderlands. His writing was distinguished by its expansive scope, bold argumentation, and mastery of detail.
Al loved teaching and twice received the CEU Teacher of the Year award. He dedicated his 2022 book, Storms over the Balkans during the Second World War, to “his students on two continents.” In recent years, he welcomed students to the department with rousing introductory lectures, and he continued to supervise Ph.D. and M.A. students well into his second retirement.
He was the representative of an endangered species: a scholar without mannerisms or pretensions, who always spoke his mind and never gave in to the floating Zeitgeist. He was gentle, polite, a highly civilized debatteur. Still, Al was always himself: with strong – sometimes, in some circles, unfashionable – views, backed up by the distillation of archival sources, the result of time-consuming, meticulous research. The ideal teacher and partner in scholarly debates.
In the department, he was an irreplaceable presence. At public lectures he usually asked the first and most erudite question. He had a booming voice, a ready laugh, and a welcoming manner. He spoke memorably about the first US-USSR Cultural Exchange to Moscow in 1958 that spawned much of his subsequent scholarship and friendships. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University and his B.A at Colgate University, where he first charted his path in Russian studies. His friends appreciated stories from his New York childhood, when he would scrapbook newspaper articles about World War II under the watch of an influential teacher who sparked his passion for history.
From an early age Al revered classical music and his acting experience undoubtedly had an impact on his magnetic lecturing style. He was a dapper dresser, rarely seen without a scarf, overcoat, and fedora. He adored Budapest and its swimming pools. And he was a published historical novelist.
His legacy is a source of celebration and inspiration for his friends in the department.