Teodor Shanin

Teodor Shanin (29 October 1930 – 4 February 2020) was a British sociologist who served for many years as Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is credited with pioneering the study of the Russian peasantry in the West, and is best known for his first book, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia, 1910–25 (Clarendon Press, 1972). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shanin moved to Russia, where, with funding from the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation and other sources, he founded the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences in 1995. Shanin was President of the Moscow School, Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, and an Honorary Fellow of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. His principal research interests included Marxism, peasant studies, historical sociology, the sociology of knowledge, informal economies, epistemology and higher education. In 2002, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to education in Russia.