Harold Shukman obituary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/aug/20/harold-shukman

Version 0 of 1.

In an age of scholarly compartmentalisation, the Russian historian Harold Shukman, who has died of prostate cancer aged 81, argued for the need to see the interconnections of history, literature, politics and everyday life. He highlighted the iniquities and idiocies of the Soviet communist order, and although he acknowledged the positive aspects of the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, he was sceptical about the motives of the reformers and their prospects of success.

Born in London, Harry came from a family of Jewish immigrants who had fled poverty and discrimination in the Russian empire before the first world war. His father, David, had started a new life as a tailor in the East End of London, with such success that he soon moved his business to the West End.

But the fall of the Romanov monarchy in the February 1917 revolution had the sudden effect of making Russian refugees eligible for conscription into the provisional government's armed forces. David arrived in northern Russia just in time for Lenin's October revolution and it was years before he succeeded in returning to Britain after many adventures. War Or Revolution (2006), arguably Harry's finest book, was about the fate of conscripts like his father.

Life was not easy for the Shukmans, as David rebuilt his business in the 1920s. Harry had a patchy early schooling. After leaving Hendon technical college in 1947, he picked up what jobs he could and enjoyed his hobby, bicycling, until he was called up for national service.

As the cold war intensified, hundreds of bright conscripts were offered training in foreign languages with a view towards later use in British intelligence. Harry took the gruelling Russian course run by the Joint Services School for Linguists, in Cambridge and Bodmin, Cornwall. With Geoffrey Elliott, he later wrote a vivid account of this period, Secret Classrooms (2006), which highlighted how the training opened doors to careers few of the trainees had ever imagined possible for themselves.

Taking advantage of the Attlee government's educational reforms, Harry studied Russian and Serbo-Croat at Nottingham University, where he achieved a first-class degree.

In 1954 Harry was the first Russian-speaking British student to visit the USSR. Two years later, back home, he gained a glimpse of high international politics when acting as interpreter for the USSR's ex-premier Georgi Malenkov on his visit to the UK. The British secret services had cooked up a scheme for the Daily Mail to publish a false report of an internal Kremlin coup against the post-Stalin reformers in the Soviet leadership. The idea was to tempt Malenkov to seek asylum in London rather than return to Moscow, where he could risk arrest for his reformist agenda. Harry wanted no part in the political skulduggery and declined to read out the fictitious article to Malenkov. The episode left him with a wry sense of the brittleness of existence for those in power.

His ambition was to write a doctorate on the Jewish Labour Bund, the socialist political movement in pre-revolutionary Russia, and for this purpose he moved with his wife, Ann – a scholar of Russian literature whom he had married in 1956 – to Oxford. They had three children, David, Henry and Clare.

Harry's work demonstrated the wide impact of the Bundists on the other revolutionary parties before and during 1917. The doctoral research won him a university lectureship at Oxford, where he eventually became director of the Russian centre at St Antony's College. Despite the admiration for his work on the Bund, he declined to turn his DPhil into a book: he was always finding more urgent things to do. Among them was a popular textbook on Lenin and the Russian revolution.

Harry co-wrote A History of World Communism (1975) with Bill Deakin, the warden of St Antony's, and HT Willetts. The book was better than Harry, a most modest man, claimed. He recalled that Deakin prolonged editorial tasks by holding discussions in the vacation at his home in the south of France, where the contributors drank more of the local vintages than enabled rigorous historical analysis.

After Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Harry concentrated on translations, rendering Anatoli Rybakov's anti-Stalin novel Children of the Arbat into English. He translated for and befriended the prolific historian Dmitri Volkogonov. In that period of rapid structural change, Volkogonov would ask him to give a more "liberal" slant to the English texts than appeared in the Russian originals. This was a bridge too far for Harry, who was happy to condense the books but refused to act as political amanuensis.

After he and Ann divorced, Harry married again in 1973; his new wife, Barbara, a professional artist with a flair for brilliant colours, widened his cultural scope still further. Each of them already had three children and the family hearth was important for both of them. He reserved his most impressive and prolific scholarship for the years of his retirement after 1998, sometimes publishing with his friends Elliott and Felix Patrikeeff. He had a stylish gait and never ceased to think of himself as a lucky fellow. He was warm-hearted, gregarious and a master of the pointful anecdote. He saw history – and life – outside the boxes of convention.

He is survived by Barbara; the children of his first marriage; and three stepchildren, Ghislaine, Amelia and Adam.

• Harold Shukman, historian, born 23 March 1931; died 11 July 2012