This title includes case studies on local self-government (the Zemstvos), state Duma elections, the Tsarist government, and state council before and during World War I.
Mary Schaeffer Conroy, Emeritus Professor, University of Colorado at Denver, received her Ph. D. in Russian History from Indiana University in 1964. Her first trip to Russia was in 1963. In addition to teaching at Kansas State University, the University of Illinois (1965-68), and the University of Colorado from 1975-2006, she has lectured to civic groups, for museum exhibits, at international conferences, and on Volga cruises in the 1990s.
Conroy's books on Russia have two foci, politics in late Imperial Russia and medical care in late Imperial Russia and the USSR. Her 1976 study of Petr A. Stolypin, governor of several Russian provinces, then Minister of Internal Affairs and Chair of the Council of Ministers from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, dealt with the competency of the government of Nicholas II. In addition to mining written records research involved meetings with Stolypin's daughter Maria von Bock, Prince A. V. Obolenskii, and many other notables of late Imperial Russia. Persona non grata in Soviet Russia, Stolypin has become an icon in post-Soviet Russia. Expertise on this political figure led to interaction with another Stolypin biographer, Boris G. Fedorov, Minister in Boris Yel'tsin's cabinet. EMERGING DEMOCRACY IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA, a collection of writings by international historians, published in 1998, edited by Conroy and to which she contributed a chapter, emphasized that Russian citizens increasingly participated in the political process on the local and central levels in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. Continued exploration of the degree to which democracy flourished in late Imperial Russia has entailed continued correspondence with Swedish, Russian, Finnish, British, and American scholars.
The shortages of pharmaceuticals in the Soviet Union that Conroy noticed in the 1970s and 1980s prompted her to investigate health care and pharmacies and production of pharmaceuticals, integral to health care, in late Imperial Russia and the USSR. Articles on malaria, school hygiene, narcotic addiction and treatment and three books on pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry resulted. The books, based on newly available archival materials, demonstrate that despite the controlling and intrusive tsarist government, pharmacists and 100 or so pharmaceutical factories were innovative and contributed to the well being of the citizenry in the late 19th, early 20th century. In contrast, although Soviet pharmacies, vaccine institutes and pharmaceutical factories made strides they were increasingly thwarted by a centralized, far more controlling government and a dysfunctional economy. Thus, despite talented scientists, Soviet pharmaceuticals were not internationally competitive.
Conroy's newest book on E. Virgil Neal describes the adventures of this accountant, banker, hypnotist, patent medicine salesman, cosmetics and perfume baron, and womanizer in Missouri, New York, the 1920s Soviet Union, and occupied France during World War II. The book evaluates Neal's business savvy in competing with contemporaries like Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Richard Hudnut. It includes hundreds of never-before-seen family photos, courtesy of a wonderful Neal family friend and executor of the Neal estate. The book revises depictions of Neal in French accounts. Research entailed encounters with interesting American and French historians as well as delightful trips to Neal's chateau in Nice.
