От Chestnut
К Chestnut
Дата 12.10.2012 14:56:58
Рубрики WWII; Спецслужбы; Армия; ВВС;

Re: Военные и...

>Harold Shukman


>Британский историк России и СССР (Оксфорд, Сэнт-Энтониз), переводивший >с русского в том числе книги Волкогонова, и сын участника РЯВ

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9566293/Harold-Shukman.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3561765.ece

Historian of modern Russia, biographer of Stalin and Rasputin and translator of novels and studies of the leaders of the Revolution

Harold Shukman was a historian of 19th and 20th-century Russia, a prolific translator of Russian literary and political writings and an author on subjects as diverse as literature and the world of espionage. For more than 50 years he was associated with the University of Oxford as a lecturer in modern Russian history and with St Antony’s College where he was a Fellow and, at one time, director of its renowned Russian and East European Centre.

From the 1960s and until his retirement in 1998 he was deeply involved in developing and enriching Russian studies at Oxford as an academic discipline in an era when the Cold War cast its ominous shadow over scholarly research in this field. He also helped to organise a popular weekly seminar at St Antony’s at which both prominent scholars and historical figures appeared — among them, like a ghost from the past, Alexander Kerensky, the dominant if short-reigning Prime Minister in the Russian Provisional Government established in the wake of February 1917 and the fall of the Tsarist monarchy.

Shukman’s scholarly work was characterised by a sense of both the futility and the tragedy of the Russian and Soviet history that began with Kerensky and culminated with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Shukman admired but whose attempts at reform eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some of Shukman’s work was devoted to the 19th-century seeds of this grim story.

Harold Shukman was born in London in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants who in 1913 had fled anti-Semitic persecution in Russia. His father, David Shukman, a tailor, was soon subjected to an excruciating dilemma which Harold later wrote about in the book War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 (2006). The British Government, despite the growing demands of the First World War, at first did not impose conscription on some 30,000 Russian Jewish immigrant men of military age like Harold’s father. But when the Romanov monarchy collapsed in February 1917, Britain gave these immigrants a choice: join the British Army or be repatriated for service in Russia. Harold’s father was among some 3,500 who chose the latter. He survived the hardships that ensued following the October Revolution and eventually succeeded in making his way back to London. Shukman’s book is a detailed study of this heretofore little-known story, where both the personal and the collective are poignantly interwoven.

It may well be that this personal family history had already foreordained Shukman’s future interests. But his road to an academic career in Russian history had a more practical beginning. After an unremarkable early education, he was offered the prospect, during his National Service, of Russian language training at the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) in Cambridge and Bodmin. No doubt the purpose of this course was to produce linguists for the various intelligence tasks made necessary by the emerging Cold War. Many years later, Shukman would co-write with Geoffrey Elliott the book Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War (2002) in which the JSSL intelligence training programme is meticulously described. In the event, however, instead of taking that “espionage” route to a career, Shukman turned to academic studies.

In 1956 he completed a first-class degree in Russian language and literature at Nottingham University and then moved to St Antony’s College where in 1960 he received the DPhil for a thesis on the Bund, an important socialist and cultural movement among Russian Jews in prerevolutionary Russia. After a year spent as an Astor Fellow at Harvard and Stanford universities in the United States, he returned to St Antony’s in 1961 as a research fellow and, in 1969, became a Governing Body Fellow. He remained at the college for the rest of his life.

During the two and a half decades or so from the early 1960s, the college became a leading centre of Russian and Soviet studies and a home to some of the most distinguished scholars of the time, among them David Footman, Max Hayward, George Katkov, Harry Willetts, Ronald Hingley, Sergei Utechin, Richard Kindersley, Michael Kaser and Archie Brown. All aspects of Russia and Russian culture were considered to be within the purview of its lectures and seminars and, in fact, the founding Warden of St Antony’s, Sir William Deakin, a distinguished historian of Europe in his own right, was also an expert on Russian and East European subjects.

In this atmosphere of intellectual discussion and research, Shukman flourished and published a number of important works, including, in 1975, together with Deakin and Willetts, A History of World Communism. He wrote short biographies of Rasputin and Stalin, a study of Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1967) and, towards the end of his life, together with Felix Patrikeeff, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War: Transporting War (2007). He was also the editor of a large number of works, among them The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1988); Stalin’s Generals (1993); and Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century (2000).

If this provides an idea of his range and scope of interests, his work as a translator from the Russian was no less prodigious. Among his translations are plays by Isaac Babel, two novels by Anatoly Rybakov, Heavy Sand (1981) and Children of the Arbat (1988), as well as the Memoirs of Andrei Gromyko (1989) and the three ruthlessly critical biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky by the Russian general and historian Dmitri Volkogonov, which appeared in the 1990s and had a powerful impact on the subsequent re-evaluation of Soviet history. In all these capacities, as author, editor and translator, Shukman has left a deep imprint upon the study both of Russia and of the Soviet Union.

Shukman had great personal charm and graciousness and enjoyed endearing relationships with friends and colleagues. He possessed a sharp wit and an irrepressible sense of humour and was a celebrated raconteur and conversationalist within the sometimes overbearing corridors of academia.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara, an artist who turned him into an enthusiast of modern art and its techniques, two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage and two stepdaughters and a stepson.

Harold Shukman, historian, was born on March 23, 1931. He died on July 11, 2012, aged 81

Prince Roy of Sealand

Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 15.10.2012 18:15:18

Re: Военные и...

Group Captain Sir Richard Kingsland


Австралийский военный пилот, в 1940 г предотвративший арест фельдмаршала Горта вишистами и доставивший его в Гибралтар (за что получил DFC)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9607727/Group-Captain-Sir-Richard-Kingsland.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (15.10.2012 18:15:18)
Дата 16.10.2012 12:03:54

Re: Военные и...

Colonel Clive Fairweather

Офицер SAS, командовавший первым этапом операции по освобобждению иранского посольства в Лондоне от террористов

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/9610176/Colonel-Clive-Fairweather.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От JGL
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 12.10.2012 15:37:42

Re: Военные и...

Здравствуйте,

>Prince Roy of Sealand

>Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html
Не на нефтяной, а как раз на очень топичной бывшей ПВОшной ;)

С уважением, Юрий.