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Prof. Hugh Seton-Watson
George Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson (15 February 1916 - 19 December 1984) was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia. A Professor of Russian History of the University of L...view moreGeorge Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson (15 February 1916 - 19 December 1984) was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia. A Professor of Russian History of the University of London, he was widely considered an eminent expert on East European affairs and authored a number of standard works, including Eastern Europe Between the Wars (1945), The East European Revolution (1950), and From Lenin to Khrushchev (1960). His most famous work, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 was published in 1967.
Born in London, England, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1938.
After working for the British Foreign Office in Belgrade and Bucharest at the start of WWII, he joined the British Special Operations Executive. Interned by the Italians after the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis in 1941, he was repatriated to Britain, and later posted to the British special forces in Cairo, where he remained until 1944. In January 1944 he moved to Istanbul where he performed intelligence activities among the refugees coming from the Balkans.
He wrote most of his first major work, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918-1941 in Cape Town while on his way from Italy to Britain after the fall of Yugoslavia, finishing it in Cairo during the battle of El Alamein in 1942. In 1945 he was appointed praelector in politics at University College, Oxford. In 1951 he was appointed to the chair of Russian history at the University of London, where he remained until 1983, exercising a major influence over British and American understandings of Russia during the Cold War. He subsequently became the Professor Emeritus of Russian history.
He received a DLitt from Oxford in 1974 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 1983. In 1981 he was appointed CBE.
He died in Washington, D.C. in 1984 at the age of 68.view less