Peter Fraunholtz

Pete Fraunholtz teaches courses for the History Department, International Affairs, and the Global Studies MA Program. Recent and upcoming courses focus on The Vietnam Wars, The World in a Decade: 1990s, Emerging Economies, History of the Soviet Union, and The Mediterranean World. Professor Fraunholtz’s academic work experience has included travel to Germany, Russia (for nearly two years in the early 1990s), France, Turkey, Hungary, China, and, for many of the last 12 years, Morocco as Faculty Leader for the NU Dialogue of Civilization program. His research scholarship focuses on Revolutionary Russia, specifically civil war-era food supply and grain procurement challenges and policies, primarily in the Middle Volga region, 1918-1920. Based on primary research conducted in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Middle Volga province of Penza, his work challenges key aspects of the standard Western narrative concerning the Bolsheviks’ approach to the Russian countryside during the civil war years.

Recent Publications

“The Geography of Rural Administration and the Reestablishment of Authoritarian Rule: The Subcounty Role in the Bolshevik Procurement Apparatus, 1919-1920.”  Historical Geography (2025) forthcoming.

“From Producer to Peripheral to Periphery and Back: The Evolution of a Provincial Food-Supply Apparatus in Black Earth Russia, Penza, July 1917-November 1918.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies (2025) vol. 59 (1): 63-89.

“From Ambivalence to Accuracy: The Provisional Government’s Grain Registration in an Intermediary Province, Penza 1917.” The Russian Review (2024) vol. 83 (2): 193-208.

“Russian Grain Procurement in a Revolutionary State: Grain Registration in Penza Province, 1917–1919.” Agricultural History (2024) vol. 98 (1): 71-102.

“Peasants in the Russian Revolution: Adaption, Anxiety, Action” in Alston, Hickey, Kolonitskii, Schedewie, Swain, eds. Handbook on the Russian Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

Recent Presentations

“Variable Rainfall, Variable Harvests:  State Accommodation and/or Peasant Subversion in Civil War-Era Grain Procurement in Soviet Central Russia.”  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural History Society, June 2025.

“Crisis and Reform in Russian Rural Administration: Statism, Bureaucratization, and Local Self-Government, 1874-1921.”  Paper presented at the Canadian Slavic Association Annual Conference, May 2025.

“State and Peasant, Weather and Grain: Reexamining Russian Food-Supply in Revolution and Civil War.” Paper presented at the Northeast Regional Meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, April 2025.

“Land and Food, Sickle and Hammer: The Rise and Fall of the Left SR-Bolshevik Coalition in Penza Province, December 1917-August 1918.”  Paper presented at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Boston, November 2024.

Recent and Upcoming Course Offered

Russian Foreign Policy

Global Cold War

Colonialism/Imperialism

The World in a Decade: the 1990s

The World Since 1945

The Vietnam Wars

Globalization and International Affairs