Professor Alexander Dallin (born May 21, 1924, in Germany - died July 22, 2000) served as Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, in the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at Stanford University. (It has since been renamed the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, adding an E to the acronym).
Dallin arrived in the United States in 1940. He studied at Harvard and worked on a project interviewing emigrees from the Soviet Union. The program evaluated the workings of the Soviet government based on reports of those interviewed. He worked in the Russian Institute at Columbia University before coming to Stanford. He published many works and received the Wolfson History Prize.
He was married to Gail W. Lapidus, a person who shared his encyclopedic knowledge of eastern Europe and who served as senior fellow at IIS and Professor of Political Science. Dallin was frequently present in open-to-the-public CREES seminars on campus where his expertise and talent were shared. The Faculty Senate at Stanford reported that Dallin, "...chaired virtually every major committee in the field and was a long-term Board Member and President of the AAASS, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies."
David Holloway and Norman Naimark edited a book in honor of Dr. Dallin, Reexamining the Soviet experience: essays in honor of Alexander Dallin (ISBN 0-8133-8954-2) published in 1996.