Leonard Schapiro as Student of Soviet Politics

Abstract

Leonard Bertram Schapiro was born in Glasgow on 22 April 1908. His family was of Russian Jewish background, and Leonard himself spent much of his childhood in Riga and St Petersburg-Petrograd. It is London, however, where he has made his life. After studying at St Paul’s School and University College, London, he was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1932, practising on the London and Western circuits. This first career was interrupted by war service, initially in the Monitoring Service of the BBC and then on the General Staff at the War Office, where his knowledge of languages, particularly of Russian, proved a valuable asset. This experience deepened his interest in Russia, and in the nature and origins of the Soviet political and social order, which he began to study systematically after the war while resuming his practice as a barrister. Publications started appearing, beginning with a series of closely researched and thoughtful articles in the field of international law,¹ a subject on which he also lectured part-time at the London School of Economics and Political Science, followed in the early 1950s by his first essays on aspects of the Soviet political system proper, one on the trade unions² and one on the Communist Party between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Congresses.³