Hanson , Philip Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir (and Birmingham) (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 193 Hanson, Philip. Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir (and Birmingham). Upfront Publishing, Peterborough, 2020. 208 pp. Illustrations. £10.00: $14.45: €11.45 (paperback). Philip Hanson is one of the two main pioneers of scholarly study of the Soviet economy in Britain (the other being the late Alec Nove). Focusing in turn on retail trade, foreign trade and technological innovation, his work in this area culminated in The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (Harlow, 2003). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he took part in research projects on the economy of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s at the regional as well as national level (pp. 156–67). Now more or less retired, Hanson has given us in this memoir not only a wrily humorous account of his own life and career but also an illuminating overview of the emergence and development of a new academic subfield. Hanson found his métier through a serendipitous combination of circumstances. Reaching maturity at a time when national service had not yet ended, he was trained as a Russian interpreter by the army. He then studied economics at Cambridge, choosing the subject for its relevance to public affairs and in preparation for a career as an economist in government service and eventually in international organizations. However, he was not happy in his first posting, at the Treasury, and his initial contract was not renewed. Only then did he join the faculty of Exeter University, where he decided to combine his Russian with his economics, thereby becoming an analyst of the Soviet economy. He was to return to government service, at the British embassy in Moscow, but only briefly, until expelled in a ‘spy exchange’. There was one major exception to Hanson’s usual concentration on the economic aspect of Soviet Studies, and that was his enthusiasm for the original analysis of Soviet society embodied in the voluminous fiction and art of the dissident Russian philosopher, Aleksaner Zinov´ev. A section of the memoir is devoted to Zinov´ev and the evolution of his thinking (pp. 122–25). Most of Hanson’s research and teaching has been at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies. He takes a positive view of CREES as a place where people work together harmoniously despite sharply conflicting political outlooks (pp. 94–95). Having been at CREES myself — I took Hanson’s courses on Soviet Economy and Comparative Economic Systems, wrote a PhD thesis under his supervision, and collaborated with him in follow-up research — I fully concur with that view. Much of the scholarly value of the memoir lies in descriptions of the many research projects in which the author has been involved and in the summaries of their results. He even discusses the theses of his two ‘most idiosyncratic’ doctoral students — Helene Ryding (on district heating in Soviet cities) and myself (on the Soviet family budget survey) (pp. 194–96). SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 194 Also of interest are Hanson’s accounts of his discussions with academic colleagues, businesspeople, government officials and military men on his many trips abroad. This gives us perspectives on issues and events not only from Moscow, London and Washington but also — for instance — from Accra, Almaty, Kaliningrad, Kyoto and Warsaw. Hanson concludes his memoir by confessing to a ‘smug’ confidence in the intrinsic value of his life’s work: ‘We [academics] know that what we do is worthwhile… We are trying to understand and explain’ (p. 199). Providence, RI Stephen D. Shenfield ...