Not
many university rectors can fire a Sten gun. Even fewer have lived
through Siberian exile, endured starvation, raised a siege, defied a
government, founded a discipline, and in retirement returned to serve
the land of their boyhood persecution.
So
if Teodor Shanin, 71, is the toughest-looking gong-holder at
Buckingham Palace next month, when the Queen awards him the OBE for
services to Russian tertiary education, it is because life has made
him so. Otherwise the eminent sociologist and creator of the first
Russian-British university would never have survived.
Despite
his harsh childhood experiences under Stalin, when the Soviet Union
collapsed, Shanin felt "an obligation", as one of the few
British academics who spoke Russian, to help rebuild the country. His
idea was to create a new Russian-British university to train and
retrain Russian professionals and academics.
By
1992 he had raised money from the British Council, the Macarthur
Foundation and the Hungarian financier George Soros, with the Russian
government agreeing to pay 10% of the cost and provide a building.
Neither materialised. After a series of broken promises, he called a
meeting with the Russian education minister to cancel the project.
Eventually,
in 1995, backed by the Russian Academy of National Economy, but not
the Russian government, the new Moscow School of Social and Economic
Sciences opened. Today it runs MBAs and masters courses for Russian
sociologists, lawyers, social workers, political scientists, and
cultural and educational managers, taught predominantly by Russian
academics trained in England, and validated by Manchester and
Kingston Universities.
Shanin,
who is now retired from Manchester and spends four weeks out of five
in Moscow as the school's first rector, still has battles on his
hands. The first year's promised Russian money did not arrive. This
year, academy rents and facilities charges rocketed unexpectedly.
It
sounds a typical story of corruption and chaos - the only story
westerners tend to hear about Russia. Concerned about precisely that,
Shanin has for some time been taking groups of lawyers,
businesspeople and journalists to Russia to see the self-sacrifice
and idealism - including that of his own staff - which never make the
headlines. "For a year my staff worked on two-thirds salaries.
Now we have another crisis and they have agreed to cut their salaries
by 10%. To work with such people is an honour."
But
nevertheless not combat-free. Though would the professor want it
otherwise? "Moscow is a most peculiar environment: difficult
interesting, exciting. When I come back to England, for my first few
days there's an incredible relief. To be somewhere you don't have to
fight like hell simply to survive, where people smile at you in the
street.
"But
after a week I often begin to feel under-used. I am ready for hard
work. Not for a row. I don't look for rows. I am a gentle man. But I
will not give way if I think I am right."
Until
Teodor was 10, the Shanins had led a comfortable and secure life as
wealthy, intellectual, Polish-speaking Jews in the Russian city of
Vilnius. His mother was a university graduate; his father, who fought
as a stu dent alongside workers and peasants in the 1917 Revolution,
ran the family galoshes factory.
Then,
in 1941, Stalin's police arrived at the Shanin bourgeois front door.
Teodor's father was to be imprisoned in Siberia. Teodor and his
mother were to follow him into exile. Teodor's younger sister, a
frail four-year-old, was left behind with their grandfather.
Weeks
after the family's departure, the Nazis marched into Vilnius and
murdered every Jew in the city. Teodor and his mother travelled first
to Siberia and, a year later, by cattle train to Samarkand.
Samarkand's
black marketeers almost immediately offered the newly arrived
11-year-old a "job" carrying loaves stolen from the
state-owned bakery. Over the next two years he and his mother lived
off his earnings until his father arrived: "It was impossible to
do the bread any more. To me it was a game. But my father was afraid
of doing something illegal. You can only do this when you are not
afraid. Once you are afraid, your eyes will give you away."
Instead
his parents sent him to school. He raced through the grades,
matriculating a year early at 17 when his family left Eastern Europe
for France. On their way they stopped in Vilnius, searching
fruitlessly for his sister. Enraged by her loss, he was spoiling for
a fight: "I was a violent Zionist. I wanted to get arms and go
to Palestine. That was my reaction to what had happened to me."
By
March 1948 he was there. He spent two months learning Hebrew, and
then joined Palmah, the SAS equivalent of Israel's proto-army.
When
the war ended he trained as a social worker and took a job in the
poorest Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. His clients' conditions appalled
him. He entered left-wing politics; took a part-time degree in
sociology and economics and then made his way to Britain.
When
Shanin arrived in 1963 at Birmingham University's Centre for Russian
and East European Studies, he was homeless and jobless. Despite
making angrily clear his lack of interest in the subject suggested by
his supervisor, he began a PhD on the peasants' role in the Russian
Revolution. It was the start of an academic career that would last
almost 50 years, and an entirely new research field known as
peasantology.
Peasants
inhabit an economic structure entirely different from either
capitalism or socialist state ownership, he came to argue. Their
work, food and housing are dependent on what he calls the "informal
economy" - the network of family, unofficial and even criminal
activity.
Marxist
and market economists had always dismissed such activity as marginal.
He argued: "How can you call it marginal when half of mankind
lives like this?"
His
books included Peasants and Peasant Society and The Awkward Class.
Colleagues, unsurprisingly, nicknamed him Awkward Teodor. He had a
burst of cult status as a Sheffield University lecturer in the late
60s, when radical students and academics fell upon the argument that
Vietnamese peasants, secure in their informal economy, would not want
to be "liberated" by American capitalism.
In
1970 Shanin left Sheffield to become professor of sociology at Haifa
University, which then had the most Arab students in Israel. Almost
at once he was embroiled in a row. The university, on security
service advice, had dismissed a Palestinian lecturer whose uncle was
a political radical. Shanin and three colleagues protested in the
senate: "We had a vicious argument. It's not like Britain where
everybody is polite and nice even if they hate each other. It's
Israel. So we shouted."
They
also lost. He joined the political opposition and the Peace Now
campaign. He had fought for Israeli independence under a promise that
Arabs would be equal citizens in the new land. None of it had made
any difference. His eyes are watery now as he remembers: "After
three years I said I wouldn't live in a land like South Africa. I
said I never took from this country anything. I always gave it. I am
going."
He
returned to England in 1973, together with his wife, Shulamit Ramon,
professor of social work at Anglia Polytechnic University. After a
brief spell in Oxford he was offered a chair of sociology at
Manchester. He stayed there for 25 years, taking British nationality,
travelling to research the informal economy, the Russian Revolution,
the development of Africa, peasants across the world.
During
the 1980s, on a visit to Russia, his Soviet "minders"
warned him against meeting unapproved academics. They picked the
wrong man for a fight. "I told them to get lost. I said, I am
not your subject. I am a subject of the Queen of England." The
Russians refused him a subsequent visa; he encouraged the British
Council to retaliate by refusing visas to Russian academics. The
stand-off lasted four years before the Russians caved in.
