Robert Vincent Daniels

[1] The Daniels family moved extensively throughout Bill's childhood, but he generally returned each summer to Burlington, Vermont, the town from whence his parents hailed and where his grandparents remained.

[2] Daniels' dissertation on the Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in the Russian Communist Party up to the year 1924, was directed by historians Michael Karpovich and Merle Fainsod.

As was the case with many historians of the Soviet period, Daniels became greatly interested in the process of development in Russia following the 1991 collapse of communism and authored several books on the topic.

In 1992, Daniels was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the main academic society for scholars of Russia, Central, and Eastern Europe in the United States.

Although best remembered as the author and editor of a series of paperback academic textbooks targeted at university undergraduates, Daniels contributed two important works of history during the decade of the 1960s.

"Fundamental changes were taking place in the movement during these years," Daniels argued, and therefore "present-day Communism must accordingly be regarded as the evolutionary product of circumstances.

"[3]: 3  Such a view stood in opposition to the dominant totalitarian model of the day, which tended to depict the Soviet Union as monolithic and immutable without the exertion of external force.