Paul Avrich, who died February 27 at 74, was a professor of history at Queens College and the leading historian of anarchism in America and Russia.

He was the author of a dozen books on individual anarchists, movements, and incidents like the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886, in which seven police officers were killed by a bomb while breaking up a meeting of striking anarchists. The incident and its aftermath, including the wrongful conviction of seven suspects and the execution of four suspects, cast a pall over the anarchist movement and, Avrich argued, made organized labor turn away from radical ideas for decades.

Beginning in 1963, when he started interviewing elderly editors of the Yiddish newspaper the Free Voice of Labor (Freie Arbeiter Stimme, founded in 1890), Avrich interviewed hundreds of old-time anarchists, preserving diverse traditions from New York’s Russian, Jewish, and Italian communities. Many of the interviews were preserved in his 1996 book “Anarchist Voices.” Avrich also collected all sorts of other materials related to anarchism, including newspapers – anarchists published 500 newspapers in America alone – in an archive that ended up at the Library of Congress in 1986.When he found out about the donated collection, an anarchist friend of Avrich’s was incredulous: “You gave it to the government?”

Descended from an Odessan family that immigrated to America around the time of the Russian Revolution, Avrich could have been from anarchist stock himself, but described his politics as “Independent.” The family settled in Brooklyn, and Avrich’s father was a dress manufacturer in the garment district.

After graduating with high honors from Cornell in 1952,Avrich entered the Air Force and attended Russian language school before being stationed in West Germany, where he worked in intelligence operations. He returned to graduate school in the late 1950s. In 1961, while doing research for his dissertation on the role of factory committees in the Russian Revolution, he uncovered new evidence about the Kronstadt rebellion, an uprising of seamen that was brutally suppressed in 1921. “Kronstadt 1921” (1970) was the first reliable account of an event long obscured by propaganda, both Soviet and anti-Soviet.

Avrich was also the author of “The Russian Anarchists” (1967) and “Russian Rebels, 1600-1800” (1972).

Switching his focus from Russia, Avrich in 1978 published “An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre,” about an associate of Emma Goldman and a writer whom he called “a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist.” (Avrich also ruffled the feathers of anarchist friends by showing from her own letters that Goldman at one point was an enthusiastic Bolshevik.)

Avrich next focused on history that seemed to recapitulate itself in the liberal educational experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. “The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States” documented a widespread movement that at one point included Goldman, who in 1915 founded the utopian community of Stelton in Piscataway, N.J., to educate children along lines meant to produce “a new human being.” Avrich became an enthusiastic attendee at the former colonist’s annual conventions.

In “The Haymarket Tragedy” (1984) Avrich lamented that the identity of the bomber would probably never be known. But the book’s publication inspired a California psychologist to step forward and claim credit for her grandfather, one George Meng, an obscure German-born anarchist who died soon after the Haymarket incident in a saloon fire. “While we cannot say for certain,” Avrich told the New York Times, after investigating the evidence, “I believe that he probably threw the bomb.”

He also had a theory about the identity of the perpetrator of the Wall Street explosion of 1920, in which a bomb in a cart parked outside the headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Company killed more than 30 people. Avrich pinned the blame on Mario Buda, an Italian anarchist enraged by the indictment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, also Italian anarchists, on murder charges widely believed to be a frame-up.

Avrich wrote at length about the latter case in “Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background” (1991), presenting evidence that the two were dedicated bomb makers and not dreamy idealists, as many believed of at least Vanzetti.

He was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for history, first for the Haymarket book, and then for the Sacco and Vanzetti book.

Lean and lanky, Avrich reveled in the classroom, speaking usually without notes about his favorite subject, which he apparently was the first to teach as a stand-alone subject.

In 1997, he told Q, the magazine of Queens College, that what had first drawn him to studying anarchists was their courage.

He said that anarchists confronted communists, saying, “We know what you’re after. You want to take over the government. You’re making revolution for yourselves, not for the workers.”

“I felt it was the truth,” Avrich said. “And they had the guts to say it. These people had great integrity.”

Paul Avrich
Born August 4, 1931, in New York City; died February 17 at his home in New York of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease; survived by his wife, Ina, his daughters, Jane and Karen, and his sister, Dorothy.