Teodor Shanin was born in Wilno in 1930. He was exiled to Siberia in 1941 and after being freed on amnesty lived in Samarkand, Lodz, and Paris. In early 1948 he left for Palestine to take part in the Israeli War of Independence. In 1952 he graduated from the Jerusalem University College of Social Work, followed by a professional career in social work. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962 and completed his PhD in sociology in 1970 at the University of Birmingham. He became a lecturer at Sheffield University, and in 1974 he was appointed Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Rector of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at Ann ArborColumbia University. Professor Shanin was one of the originators of contemporary peasant studies. He made his name with his books “The Awkward Class” and “Peasants and Peasant Societies”, the latter of which was reprinted numerous times and in many languages. For a time it was a basic textbook delimiting the topic. Shanin was one of the initial team of editors of Journal of Peasant Studies. His other works and teaching addressed historical sociology, social economics, epistemology, interdisciplinary studies, political sciences and rural history. He paid particular attention to conceptualization and analysis of the so-called “developing societies”. His fieldwork was in Iran, Mexico, Tanzania and Russia. Shanin's methods stressed particularly interdisciplinary issues, and pointed at meeting of sociology with history, economics, philosophy and political sciences. He described himself professionally as a historical sociologist. Much of Professor Shanin's work was given to Russia and bringing to life methodological traditions of Russia's rural studies of early 20th century. It was also Russia where his research spilled into active involvement in organization within the educational sphere. This began in the early days of “perestroika” when, together with academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, he set up schools for up-training of young Soviet sociologists. The high point of those efforts became creation in 1995 of a Russian-English post-graduate university: the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, whose first Rector he became. He was President of that graduate university. He was also instrumental in setting up of the InterCentre – а multi-disciplinary research unit of MSSES. Central to his vision and analytical work were efforts to overcome the over-simplifications of the theories of “progress”. His works reflected impacts of scholars whom Shanin considered his teachers: Mark Bloch, Alexander Chayanov, Charles Wright Mills and Paul Baran. In his later research, he put forward the concept of expolary economies – types of informal economy which challenge neoclassical economics and its relationship to state policies.
