Hugh Seton-Watson

George Hugh Nicolas Seton-Watson, CBE, FBA (15 February 1916 – 19 December 1984) was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia.

Early life Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. His younger brother Christopher followed a similar career path. Hugh was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with First Class Honours in 'Modern Greats' (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).

Academic career Seton-Watson wrote most of his first major work, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 in Cape Town while on his way from Italy to Britain after the fall of Yugoslavia, finishing it in Cairo during the battle of El Alamein in 1942.

In 1945 he was appointed praelector in politics at University College, Oxford. In 1951 he was appointed to the chair of Russian history at the University of London, where he remained until 1983, exercising a major influence over British and American understandings of Russia during the Cold War. He subsequently became the Professor Emeritus of Russian history. During a three-month fellowship, beginning in October 1984, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he became ill with pulmonary problems and was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital where he died three weeks later.

Seton-Watson's Nations and States: an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (1977) made a fundamental contribution to the study of nationalism, though later overshadowed by the success of Benedict Anderson's more theoretical Imagined Communities.

The New York Times Book Review called him "the outstanding authority on the satellite countries of Eastern Europe". The decline of Imperial Russia 1855–1914 (Westview Press, 1985). The East European revolution (Westview Press, 1985) From Lenin to Khrushchev: the history of world communism (Westview Press, 1985) R.W. Seton-Watson and the Roumanians, 1906–20 (2 vols, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, București, 1988)