Teodor Shanin facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Teodor Shanin
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Shanin in 2014
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| Born | 29 October 1930 |
| Died | 4 February 2020 (aged 89) Moscow, Russia
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| Nationality | British |
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Notable work
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The Awkward Class (1972) |
| Spouse(s) | Shulamit Ramon |
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| Thesis | Cyclical Mobility and Political Consciousness of Russian Peasants 1910–1925 (1970) |
| Doctoral advisor | R. E. F. Smith |
| Influences |
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Teodor Shanin OBE (20 October 1930 – 4 February 2020) was a British sociologist. A sociologist is a scientist who studies how people live together in groups and societies. For many years, he was a professor at the University of Manchester.
He was known for being one of the first to study Russian peasants in the Western world. Peasants are people who live in the countryside and usually work on farms. His most famous book was The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia, 1910–25, published in 1972.
After the Soviet Union ended, Shanin moved to Russia. With help from groups like the Open Society Institute, he started the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences in 1995. He was the President of this school and also a professor emeritus (a retired professor who keeps their title) at the University of Manchester.
His main interests included Marxism (a way of thinking about society and economics), peasant studies, historical sociology (studying society through history), and higher education (university-level learning). In 2002, he received an award called the Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his important work in education in Russia.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Teodor Shanin was born in Vilnius on October 29, 1930. When he was 10 years old, in 1941, he was sent away to Siberia. After being set free, he lived in different cities like Samarkand, Łódź, and Paris.
In 1948, he moved to Palestine and joined the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He was part of the Harel brigade. In 1952, he finished his studies at the Jerusalem University College of Social Work. He then worked as a social worker.
He continued his education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 1962. In 1970, he earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Birmingham. His PhD paper was about how Russian peasants moved around and thought about politics between 1910 and 1925.
Academic Career and Research
After finishing his PhD, Shanin became a lecturer at Sheffield University. In 1974, he became a Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. He was also an honorary fellow of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was the Rector (head) of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences and a visiting professor at other universities.
Studying Peasants and Societies
Shanin was one of the first people to really focus on studying peasants in modern times. His books, The Awkward Class and Peasants and Peasant Societies, became very important. Peasants and Peasant Societies was reprinted many times and translated into different languages. For a while, it was the main textbook for learning about peasants.
He was also one of the first editors of The Journal of Peasant Studies. His other work and teaching covered topics like historical sociology, social economics, and political science. He was especially interested in understanding "developing societies," which are countries that are still growing and changing. He did research in places like Iran, Mexico, Tanzania, and Russia.
Shanin believed in using ideas from many different subjects, like history, economics, and philosophy, to understand society. He called himself a historical sociologist because he used history to study social changes.
Work in Russia
A lot of Shanin's work focused on Russia. He wanted to bring back old ways of studying rural Russia from the early 1900s. His research in Russia also led him to get involved in organizing education there.
When the Soviet Union was changing in the late 1980s (a time called perestroika), he worked with a famous academic named Tatyana Zaslavskaya. They set up schools to train young sociologists in the Soviet Union.
The biggest result of these efforts was the creation of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences in 1995. This was a university for graduate students (people studying after their first degree) that taught in both Russian and English. Teodor Shanin became its first Rector. He also helped create the InterCentre, a research group at the Moscow School.
Shanin was interested in challenging simple ideas about "progress." He believed that societies develop in many different ways. He was influenced by thinkers like Mark Bloch and Alexander Chayanov. In his later research, he talked about "expolary economies." These are types of informal economies that work differently from what traditional economics usually describes.
Teodor Shanin passed away on February 4, 2020, in Moscow.
Selected Books
Here are some of the books Teodor Shanin wrote or helped write:
- Introduction to the Sociology of "Developing Societies" (2003)
- Defining Peasants: Essays Concerning Rural Societies: Expolary economies and Learning from Them (1990)
- Revolution as a Moment of Truth: 1905-1907→1917-1922 (1986)
- Russia as a Developing Society: Roots of Otherness, Russia's Turn of Century (1985)
- Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (1983)
- The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia 1910-1925 (1972)
- Peasants and Peasant Societies (edited, 1971)
See also
In Spanish: Teodor Shanin para niños
