Historian of revolution’s social foundations and later memory
Born in Alexandria in 1917 and raised in Vienna and Berlin, he wrote the ‘long 19th century’ trilogy, beginning with The Age of Revolution, on the making of industrial capitalism and nationalism.
A British Marxist historian who taught at Birkbeck for many years, Hobsbawm treated the French and Industrial Revolutions together in The Age of Revolution. Echoes of the Marseillaise examined the French Revolution’s reception in later politics and historical writing. The course uses his work to consider class, social structures and changing revolutionary legacies. His interpretations must be distinguished from contemporary primary sources and from other historians’ readings.
Career timeline
1947Lecturer in history, Birkbeck College, London
1952Co-founder of the journal Past & Present
1970–1982Professor of history, Birkbeck College
1982Retired as Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck
1984–1997Visiting professor, The New School for Social Research
The revised The Great Terror argued that the opening of the archives still left its central challenge standing.
Robert Conquest was a British historian and poet who studied Soviet political violence and collectivization. His 1968 book The Great Terror used published documents and émigré testimony to present the Great Purge as a system of state terror rather than merely a series of Moscow trials, and established the period’s English-language name. His estimates of the victims and his totalitarian interpretation were partly supported by later archival releases and research, while their scale and causal claims remained contested. His work in anticommunist information activity and literature also makes him a figure at the intersection of historical scholarship and Cold War politics.
Career timeline
1937–1939Studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain
1940–1946Served as an officer in the British Army
1944–1948Served in Bulgaria as a liaison officer and later at the British legation and Allied Control Commission
1948–1956Worked in the Foreign Office Information Research Department on anti-Soviet information and propaganda
1962–1963Literary editor of The Spectator
1968Published The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties
1986Published The Harvest of Sorrow
1981–2015Senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution
The British economic historian who built the seven-volume chronicle of Soviet industrialisation
In his final volume he wrote: "While my view of Soviet history has changed… when the details of history are in conflict with preconceived ideas, the latter should give way… I remain on the Left, believing… that a better organization of society is possible."
A British economic historian. He co-authored Foundations of a Planned Economy with E. H. Carr and carried Carr's work forward into the 1930s, completing the seven-volume The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. In The Years of Hunger (2004), co-authored with Stephen Wheatcroft, he used post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at 5.5–6.5 million and argued the famine was not a planned genocide but the result of procurement-first policy, harvest failure, and belated leadership response. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in his youth, he left after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and remained on the Left, holding that 'a better organization of society is possible.'
Career timeline
1943–1946RAF radio communications service
1950BA, SSEES, University of London
1954PhD, University of Birmingham (Soviet budgetary system)
1954–1956Assistant lecturer, Institute of Soviet Studies, Glasgow
