Vasilii Ivanovich Alekseev, 1906-2002
Vasilii Ivanovich Alekseev was born in Vladimir, Russia on October 6, 1906. He graduated from Moscow University in 1930, and fell victim to the repressions of the Soviet government the same year, being arrested and sentenced to five years of labor in a prison camp. In 1941 he was drafted, and found himself in a German POW camp in 1942. Fleeing repatriation to the Soviet Union, Alekseev managed to immigrate to the United States, where he arrived in 1951.
In the U.S., Alekseev begins his career as writer and historian, publishing numerous books on Russian history, such as Nevidimaia Rossiia, Rossiia soldatskaia, The Foreign Policy of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1939-1945, The Two Russian Revolutions of 1917, The Great Revival: the Russian Church Under German Occupation, and Rol’ Tserkvi v sozdanii russkogo gosudarstva.
Alekseev taught Russian history at the University of Minnesota from 1955-1975, and defended his Ph.D. dissertation at the same institution in 1967.
He died on October 8, 2002, in Minneapolis, MN.
Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Holy Trinity Seminary. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives.
The original materials are the property of Holy Trinity Seminary.