Alexander John Motyl is an American historian, political scientist, poet, writer, translator, and painter. He is a resident of New York City. He is professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and a specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union.
He also writes opinion columns in publications such as Foreign Policy, 19FortyFive, and The Kyiv Post.
Motyl's parents emigrated as refugees from Western Ukraine after World War II, when the region was occupied by the Soviet Union. He was born in New York City.
He graduated from Regis High School in New York City in 1971. He studied at Columbia University, graduating with a BA in history in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1984.
Motyl has taught at Columbia University, Lehigh University, the Ukrainian Free University, the Kyiv-Mohyla University, and Harvard University and is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.
He is the author of eight academic books and editor or co-editor of over fifteen volumes. Motyl has written extensively on the Soviet Union, Ukraine, revolutions, nations and nationalism, and empires.
In Imperial Ends (2001), he posits a theoretical framework for examining the structure of empires as a political structure. Motyl describes three types of imperial structures: continuous, discontinuous, and hybrid. Motyl also posits varying degrees of empire: formal, informal, and hegemonic. He discusses the Russian example in an earlier book, The Post Soviet Nations.
Motyl is also active as a poet, a writer of fiction, and a visual artist. A collection of his poems have appeared in "Vanishing Points". His novels include Whiskey Priest (2005), Who Killed Andrei Warhol (2007), Flippancy (2009), The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, My Orchidia (2012), Sweet Snow (2013), Fall River, Vovochka (2015), Ardor (2016), A Russian in Berlin (2021), Pitun's Last Stand (2021) and Lowest East Side (2022). He has done readings of his fiction and poetry at New York's Cornelia Street Cafe and Bowery Poetry Club. Motyl has had one-man shows of his art in New York, Toronto, and Philadelphia. His artwork is part on the permanent collections of the Ukrainian Museum in New York City and the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Winnipeg.
In a review of his novel The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, Michael Johnson wrote in The American Spectator:
Motyl has written favorably of the claims made by former KGB officers Alnur Mussayev, Yuri Shvets and Sergei Zhyrnov that Donald Trump was cultivated and recruited by the KGB in 1987 to serve as a Russian intelligence "asset" (not an active "spy").