In her 35 years at UMass, Dr. Audrey L. Altstadt consistently combined her powerful work ethic, deep concern with fairness, and dry wit with a devotion to physical well-being, maintaining work-life balance, and rising early every single day.
Audrey came to UMass in 1990 with a PhD from the University of Chicago, having served in visiting positions at the Universities of Wisconsin and Vermont, then as assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. In 1992 she published her first monograph, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Hoover Institution Press), which earned her tenure early in 1994. The book remains standard reading for the US Foreign Service Officers assigned to the Caucasus.
“How had I, a sheltered girl from the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge raised by a widowed mother, come to be on a train running from Moscow to Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan? School. It was all about my education from high school Russian class to the University of Illinois and finally graduate school at the University of Chicago. And it was about the choices I had made along the way.”
—Audrey L. Altstadt, “Tougher than I Thought”
Audrey’s arrival here coincided with a critical moment in history: the dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of an independent Azerbaijan, on which she focused as a scholar. This took place during her third semester and catapulted her into new fame as an American expert on the oil-rich, Muslim-majority former Soviet state. While continuing her work as a teacher and scholar, she then began consulting for the Foreign Service Institute, Oxford Analytica, and Freedom House, among others. Audrey briefed eight of nine US ambassadors to Azerbaijan (until the current position, which lies empty). She also contributed to important publications for scholars, policy makers, and the broader public, including the National Interest and the Geographer.
Then came a turn. From 2004 through 2010, Audrey served as department chair. She took this role very seriously: she devoted herself to improving the department’s administration, managed a complete reshuffle of staff positions, and hired our first professional office manager. She also revamped our faculty mentoring program and implemented key changes to the graduate program.
As chair, Audrey earned the confidence of her colleagues, who recognized that she always made decisions with the good of the department in mind and was an effective ambassador to the College and University. As one colleague wrote in 2007, “She is optimistic without being giddy and realistic without losing sight of possibility.” Her devotion to duty, and her colleagues’ support, made her the first chair to be reelected in the department’s history, setting a new standard. Although successful chairs often move into deanships, which Audrey considered here and at other institutions, she ultimately chose to make the most of her unique expertise on Azerbaijan, modeling how an administrator can successfully return to research and teaching.
“I always appreciated Audrey’s constant support, counsel, and advice, from my first day at UMass until now. She was my mentor, colleague, and friend, and I counted on her unconditionally, always, no exceptions.”
—Anne F. Broadbridge
And successful she was: Audrey’s second and third books came out in 2016 and 2017: The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920–40 (Routledge, 2016), and Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (Columbia University Press, 2017). Although both are important, the former deserves special mention, since in it, for the first time in any language, Audrey told the real story of the 1937 purges of Azerbaijani writers who did not conform to Stalinist guidelines. After gaining critical archival and interview access over the course of 20 years of research, she was able to confirm long-standing rumors that one promising poet, who was head of the Writer’s Union in 1937 and devoted to the Communist Party, had indeed turned against other writers. The most famous of these, the poet and playwright Hussein Javid, was arrested, jailed, and sent secretly to Siberia, where he died without a trial. His daughter, who was 14 at the time, published his work and cleared his name decades later. After Audrey’s book came out, the daughter also had to reckon with the son of her father’s betrayer, who himself had become head of the Writer’s Union. Although Audrey told a wider story of betrayal and purging, this was the greatest bombshell she produced, which she did unflinchingly. She drove it home in Turkish presentations in Azerbaijan, to ensure that absolutely nothing could be lost in translation.
Meanwhile, Audrey continued to innovate in the classroom, developing new courses such as Putin and Putin’s Russia, Spying in History, and Human Rights and Energy Security, one of the department’s first integrative experience courses.
Now as she heads joyfully to retirement, she has three (!) new scholarly books underway: a biography of an anti-communist emigré in Paris, an account of the first US embassies established in the former Soviet republics after 1993, and a memoir of her time as a PhD student in Soviet Azerbaijan, titled "Tougher than I Thought". In addition, she is working on a fourth book, a historical novel on Hussein Javid and his daughter. As Audrey puts it: “That one section of one chapter in Politics of Culture not only revealed a secret among the Azerbaijani literary elite, but is also the bridge to my second career as a novelist.”
What a career it has been, with, perhaps, the best yet to come.
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Anne Broadbridge is professor of history and chair of the history department. This article was originally published in the 2025 edition of the UMass history magazine, Past, Present & Future.