Author of the 14-volume History of Soviet Russia; diagnosed a "latent incompatibility" between NEP markets and planning
'There was a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning.' From Foundations of a Planned Economy (1969).
A British historian and former diplomat, he authored the 14-volume A History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978), a comprehensive account of Soviet political, economic, and social life from 1917 to 1929. In international relations, The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) helped lay the foundations of classical realism, while What Is History? (1961) redefined the historian's craft as interpretation rather than the accumulation of facts. On the NEP, he judged that there was 'a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning,' an assessment that became one of four major historiographical positions on the policy's viability. He remained a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1916–1936Diplomat, British Foreign Office; Paris Peace Conference (1919) and Riga embassy (1925–1929)
- 1936–1947Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics, Aberystwyth
- 1941–1946Assistant Editor, The Times
- 1950–1978Published A History of Soviet Russia (14 vols.)
- 1953–1955Fellow and tutor in politics, Balliol College, Oxford
- 1955–1982Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
Related historical events
Diplomatic career, 1916–1936
Before he was a scholar, E. H. Carr was a diplomat. He entered the British Foreign Office in 1916 and was first assigned to its Contraband Department, which sought to enforce the wartime blockade on Germany. His transfer in 1917 to the Northern Department, which handled relations with Russia, made Russian affairs his lifelong subject. He later recalled that he then knew almost nothing about the Bolsheviks and nothing of Marxism.
In 1919 he was a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, working on the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles relating to the League of Nations and on the border between Germany and Poland. He was awarded a CBE in 1920. After service at the embassy in Paris he was posted to the Foreign Office branch dealing with the League of Nations, and from 1925 to 1929 he was Second Secretary at the embassy in Riga, Latvia. There he learned Russian in order to read Russian writers in the original and paid his first visit to Moscow in 1927.
Riga at that time had a substantial Russian émigré community, and reading Herzen, Dostoevsky and other nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals unsettled his liberal convictions; he later wrote that they had caused him to rethink them.
In the summer of 1929, as he began work on a biography of Dostoevsky, Carr befriended the émigré scholar Prince D. S. Mirsky, who was then living in Britain. From 1929 he also began reviewing books on Russian and Soviet affairs and on international relations in British literary journals, and by the early 1930s he was the Times Literary Supplement's Soviet expert. Because he remained a serving diplomat, most of his reviews in these years appeared anonymously or under the pseudonym "John Hallett."
He resigned from the Foreign Office in 1936 to move into academic life, a step in which friction with his superior, the Permanent Undersecretary Sir Robert Vansittart, and above all their disagreement over appeasement played a part.
On a second visit to the Soviet Union in 1937 he ran into Mirsky on a street in Leningrad and persuaded him to lunch; at the height of the Yezhovshchina, when unauthorized contact with a foreigner was likely to be treated as espionage, the NKVD arrested Mirsky as a British spy, and he died two years later in a camp near Magadan. When Carr learned of his friend's fate is not clear from the record.