The tradition of Slavic studies at the University of Chicago is almost as old as the University itself. It goes back to 1896 when one of Russia’s best educated men, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, came to the University of Chicago to give a series of lectures and to deliver a convocation address. It was Volkonsky’s talks on Russian art, theater and literature that are said to have sparked an enthusiasm for Russia in the University’s first president William Rainey Harper. In 1900 Harper visited Russia, met Count Tolstoy and had an audience with Tsar Nicholas II, from whom he received as a gift a case of good wine.
One bottle from this case, half emptied, is now found in the archives of Samuel Northrop Harper, the president’s son. Knowing as we do that the first thing the revolutionary sailors did after they took the Winter Palace in October 1917 was to raid Tsar’s wine cellars, the half a bottle preserved on this campus may well be all that survives from the collection of wines once owned by the last Emperor of Russia.
A few facts about the president’s son follow. Encouraged by his father, Samuel Northrop Harper went to Paris to study Russian, visited Moscow in 1904 and Petersburg in January of1905, just in time to witness “Bloody Sunday” – the Tsar’s troops shooting at a demonstration of unarmed workers near the Winter Palace. Harper reported what he had seen to the American Embassy and came back to teach courses in Russian language and political institutions at the University of Chicago. Even though he supported the democratic process in Russia, interviewed members of the Duma and was hopeful about the Provisional Government formed in the wake of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in February of 1917, Harper was dismayed and disheartened by the Bolshevik Revolution in October. Without ceasing to teach Russian subjects here in the Humanities division throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Samuel N. Harper had an official appointment to the State Department where, in 1918, he became the first expert in the field, which years later became known as Sovietology.