Pete Duncan, a longtime contributor to the Chartist, died on 13 February after some years of ill health. After teaching at Glasgow University, University College of Wales Aberystwyth and also working for a time at Chatham House, Pete spent 33 years at the University College London (UCL) School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), where he was an honorary associate professor, teaching Russian politics and foreign policy. He published influential work in this field, including The Soviet Union and India (1989), and the seminal book Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (revised in 2000). Deeply committed to intellectual exchange, Pete worked on a number of collaborative volumes, including The Road to Post-communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985-1991. He also organised the symposium Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives at UCL in 2015 and edited the subsequent 2019 open-access volume. This is still an important work considering the alternative models of economic organisation in the world after the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as a global power.
He is survived by his wife, Sasha Duncan.
Anna Paterson writes
I first met Pete in 1999 when he taught me Russian Foreign Policy and supervised my dissertation during my MA at SSEES. Everybody loved his lectures and seminars. Although you knew you were being guided by one of the leading minds in the field and that the material was immensely important, Pete’s classes were also fun; he was never condescending, and he encouraged debate. Pete always wanted me to do a PhD, and years later, in 2007, he became my PhD supervisor on Russian approaches to Afghanistan after 1991. Again, students clamoured to have Pete as a PhD supervisor because he had such a talent for nurturing intellectual growth, ideas and exchange. Pete supervised PhD students well into retirement, and the tributes to him that have poured out of this cohort since his death show the scale of the legacy he has left. Pete helped form the way I look at the world, and he’s always been one of the key people I’ve turned to in order to make sense of it. I saw him shortly before his death, and even though he was sick, he was still erudite, analytical and on top of all the details on issues from Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, to the UK. There is so much I’d like to ask him now.
Finally, as long as I’ve known him, Pete’s socialism and Trade Union activism have been at the forefront. He was always on the picket lines defending the working conditions of younger academics.
Nigel Doggett writes
I first met Pete around 1979 at a conference of the Labour Coordinating Committee (a forerunner of Mainstream). He encouraged me to join Clause 4, a group known for unsuccessfully opposing Militant’s control of the Labour Party Young Socialists and successfully in Labour Students (NOLS).
I discovered that, like me, he supported the Eastern Europe Solidarity Campaign, which campaigned in the Labour Movement for the various socialist dissident movements, and bore fruit in Polish Solidarity and later the collapse of the Stalinist regimes.
Pete also wrote a key booklet, Paved with Good Intentions, on The Politics of Militant (Clause 4 Publications), which sold many copies and influenced both the LCC and Labour Party in exposing their entryist and retrograde politics.
Clause 4 developed into a broader left group and publisher, linking up with Chartist in the early 1980s, for which Pete always maintained a supporter subscription.
Much more recently, I contacted Pete at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). He gave his seal of approval to my 2018 article for Chartist Nikolai Bukharin – Forgotten Revolutionary (see Chartist website) and encouraged me to apply for the SSEES Russian Studies Master’s course, where his encyclopaedic knowledge was displayed on Russian Politics and Russian Foreign Policy – this was after the annexation of Crimea but before the invasion of Ukraine. His clear-sighted critical views on Putin and his reliance on the Siloviki (security apparatchiks) have repeatedly been vindicated.
For well over 40 years, Pete spoke up and wrote from a clear democratic socialist perspective against tyranny, authoritarianism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and phoney peace-mongers. Strongest of all his merits were his sheer humanity and curiosity.
In early 2020, presenting the abovementioned Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives, he drolly highlighted his sentence saying party leader Jeremy Corbyn had not yet won a (general) election. (My emphasis.) We’re still waiting.
Mike Davis (editor) writes
Pete had a long association with Chartist as a supporter, writer and speaker for over 40 years. His writing was always insightful, drawing on immense knowledge of the old Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as maintaining a commitment to democratic socialism. I recently turned up a booklet published by Channel 4, New Statesman and Society and his university, based on a C4 television series. He had two articles in the collection called Soviet Spring, published in 1990. One on health, the other on nations within the USSR. He was sceptical about even Gorbachev allowing secession. But he conceded that using force against an elected government seeking independence would mean the end of glasnost and perestroika. For many new republics, the latter turned out to be the case.
Over recent years, he became passionately involved in the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, analysing developments and Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s full-scale invasion, speaking at USC and Chartist events and attending protests when his health allowed. He continued his academic work until his death. He was a generous mentor to his many students, a kind and warm-hearted comrade always giving his time to listen and sharing his thoughts over a pint in the pub.