Peter Turchin was born in the Russian city of Obninsk on 22 May 1957. His father was a physicist by education, who became a mathematician and, eventually, a dissident. The Turchins were expelled from the USSR in 1977, when Peter was enrolled at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Biology. The family moved to the United States, where Turchin continued his studies in biology at New York University. He made his living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice and deer. In 1985 he received a PhD in zoology from Duke University.
In the late 1990s Turchin did something unusual. By then Turchin felt, he writes in his new book End Times, that the “interesting questions” in animal ecology had been answered. He switched disciplines, to history: “I began to consider how the same complexity science approach could be brought to the study of human societies, both in the past and today.”
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