Raeff was born in
Moscow on July 28, 1923, and was the only child of Isaac and Victoria Raeff. Isaac Raeff was of Jewish heritage, but was not observant. Victoria Raeff's mother was Lutheran, and Victoria attended a Lutheran church in Kharkov as a child. His father was an
engineer, and his mother was a
biochemical technician. The government sent his father to
Berlin to oversee quality control on machinery destined for Russia. They refused to return to Moscow in 1927; in 1933 they moved to
Paris. They emigrated to the U.S. in 1941. Raeff attended schools in
German,
French and
English, but he spoke Russian at home, with his parents. He wrote in English, French, German, and
Russian, and also read
Italian and
Polish. Raeff served in the
U.S. Army in
World War II as an interpreter in POW camps. He attended Harvard, working with Professor
Michael Karpovich, who trained numerous scholars. He earned his Ph.D. in 1950. He taught at
Clark University from 1949 until 1961, when he moved to Columbia. He married Lillian Gottesman in 1951; they had two daughters, Anne and Catherine. Raeff's research focused on the
Russian Empire, with an emphasis on the Russian
intelligentsia at home and in
diaspora. Wirtschafter argues that he always "stressed the complexity and dynamism of the social and political arrangements that defined
Imperial Russia". Raeff directed numerous Ph.D. dissertations. His teaching and writing were free of
ideological overtones during and after the Cold War. He was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. He published numerous articles and books. ==Bibliography==