Profile:
Jonathan Daly teaches Russian, European, and world history. His courses inquire mainly into the nature of Western Civilization–how it rose and shaped the modern world–and into the unequal struggle between the Russian state and society. His books, Autocracy under Siege (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998) and The Watchful State (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), examine efforts by the Russian government before 1917 to isolate terrorists and political extremists but also to avoid indiscriminate persecution of opposition movements and figures. He compiled Russia in War and Revolution, 1914-1922: A Documentary History (Hackett Publishing Company, 2009), with his former PhD student, Leonid Trofimov, for use in teaching.

Currently, Daly is completing an interpretation of the West’s rise to world preeminence, “Revolutionary Civilization: Explaining Western Power and Influence in the Modern World.” He plans next to write a history of how the Bolshevik regime systematically dismantled most of the institutions, associations, organizations, and laws–what we call civil society–that protect individuals, families, and collectives from domination by a powerful modern state. His other publications have investigated topics in Russian and European legal history, the pre-1917 Russian press, and the Bolshevik attack on the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922.