Teodor Shanin was born in
Wilno on 29 October 1930. He was exiled to Siberia in 1941 and after being freed on amnesty lived in
Samarkand,
Łódź, and
Paris. In early 1948 he left for
Palestine to take part in the
1948 Arab–Israeli War (
Palmach: Harel brigade). In 1952 he graduated from the
Jerusalem University College of Social Work, followed by a professional career in social work. He graduated from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962 and completed his PhD in sociology in 1970 at the
University of Birmingham (where his dissertation was titled
Cyclical Mobility and Political Consciousness of Russian Peasants 1910–1925). He became a lecturer at Sheffield University, and in 1974 he was appointed Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. He was an Honorary Fellow of the
Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Rector of the
Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, a Fellow at
St Antony's College, Oxford, and visiting professor at
Ann Arbor Columbia University (US). Shanin was one of the originators of contemporary peasant studies. He made his name with his books
The Awkward Class and
Peasants and Peasant Societies, the latter of which was reprinted numerous times and in many languages. For a time it was a basic textbook delimiting the topic. Shanin was one of the initial team of editors of
The Journal of Peasant Studies. His other works and teaching addressed historical sociology, social economics, epistemology, interdisciplinary studies, political sciences and
rural history. He paid particular attention to conceptualization and analysis of the so-called "developing societies". His fieldwork was in Iran, Mexico, Tanzania, and Russia. Shanin's methods stressed particularly interdisciplinary issues, and pointed at meeting of sociology with history, economics, philosophy, and political sciences. He described himself professionally as a historical sociologist. Much of Shanin's work was given to Russia and bringing to life methodological traditions of Russia's rural studies of the early 20th century. It was also Russia where his research spilled into active involvement in organization within the educational sphere. This began in the early days of
perestroika when, together with academician
Tatyana Zaslavskaya, he set up schools for up-training of young Soviet sociologists. The high point of those efforts became creation in 1995 of a Russian-English post-graduate university: the
Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, whose first Rector he became. He was President of that graduate university. He was also instrumental in setting up of the InterCentre – a multi-disciplinary research unit of MSSES. Central to his vision and analytical work were efforts to overcome the over-simplifications of the theories of "progress". His works reflected impacts of scholars whom Shanin considered his teachers:
Mark Bloch,
Alexander Chayanov,
C. Wright Mills, and
Paul A. Baran. In his later research, he put forward the concept of expolary economies – types of informal economy which challenge neoclassical economics and its relationship to state policies. Shanin died on 4 February 2020 in
Moscow. His posthumous memoir, Becoming Teodor, From a Child of War to a Visionary Professor, was published in 2023 in English and in 2024 in Russian. ==Selected publications==