High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Paul Avrich (August 4, 1931 February 16, 2006) was a professor and historian. He taught at Queens College, New York for most of his life and was vital in preserving the history of the anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. The son of a Jewish family originally from Odessa, Avrich traveled to the USSR as an exchange student in 1961 following Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States. While there working on his thesis, The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees, he researched the Kronstadt rebellion and the role of anarchists in the Russian Revolution. This information allowed him to produce pioneering and important works on these subjects.