In 1927, Michael Rostovtzeff and Frank A. Golder offered Vernadsky a position at Yale University in the United States. At Yale, he first served as a research associate in history, and then became a full professor of Russian history in 1946. He served in that position until his retirement in 1956. He died in New Haven on June 12, 1973. Vernadsky's first book in English was a widely read textbook on Russian history, first published in 1929 and republished six times during his lifetime. It was translated to numerous languages, including Hebrew and Japanese. In 1943, he embarked on his magnum opus, A History of Russia, of which six volumes were eventually published, despite the death of his co-author, Professor Michael Karpovich, in 1959.
Interpretation of Russian history
Vernadsky took a novel approach to Russian history, presenting it as a continuous succession of empires, starting from the Scythian, Sarmatian, Gothic, and Hunnic; Vernadsky attempted to determine the laws of their expansion and collapse. His views emphasized the importance of Eurasian nomadic cultures for the cultural and economic progress of Russia, thus anticipating some of the ideas advanced by Lev Gumilev. Vernadsky became the leading American exponent of depicting Russia as much Asian as European, if not more so. He pointed out many strong cultural differences between Russia and Europe, and praised the success of Russian development along an independent path that revealed its own unique character. Vernadsky was a geographical determinist like his Yale colleague Ellsworth Huntington. They assumed that the characteristics of a land defined the character of the people and indeed of their government as well. For that reason Vernadsky was able to identify the roots of Russian culture in an ancient period long before the Slavic groups arrived. He thereby undercut the standard claim that modern Russia emerged from Kievan Rus. He emphasized the importance of the Mongol period , as the horde united the vast Eurasian plain under a single ruler. This gave tsarist Russia a strong centralized government as well as the deep distrust of Europe. Vernadsky was annoyed that Peter the Great tried to Westernize Russia, thereby distorting its natural character. He said Peter only succeeded in polarizing Russia into a Western oriented elite that stood in profound conflict with the Eurasian peasants. Indeed, Vernadsky argued that this polarization was one of the main weaknesses of the tsarist regime, making it incapable of dealing with the revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century. He celebrated the collapse of the European style parliamentary regime in the October Revolution of 1917 that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Vernadsky was not a liberal, nor was he a Communist sympathizer, but he did admire the Bolsheviks for rebuilding a strong Russia on non-European lines.
Critics
While G. Vernadsky's writings about the historical past were based upon solid archive sources, his flight from Russia separated him from original materials of the latest periods. Thus, some critics of early editions were doubtful about certain figures and estimates he made for contemporaneousness, pointing out that some of them were rather a guess than hard evidence. After a new, edition of A History of Russia appeared in 1930, S.B.Clough from Columbia University reviewed it in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:
Reviews
Vernadsky, George. A History of Russia. Pp. xix, 413. New Haven: Yale University…]
