The Life and Works of Stephen Leonard White (1945–2023)

Stephen Leonard White (1945–2023), Professor Emeritus of the University of Glasgow and a stalwart supporter of this journal, leaves in his wake a rich legacy of scholarship. A wide circle of friends and colleagues will miss his wit, generosity and erudition.

Stephen White was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 1 July 1945, and had a childhood surrounded by literature, culture and current affairs. His father, W. L (‘Jack’) White (1920–1980), a native of Cork, had by the time of Stephen’s birth already served as president of the Trinity College Dublin Philosophical Society and editor of the Trinity literary magazine, and produced award-winning theatrical productions (Murphy 2012). Jack’s career would encompass prominent roles as a journalist, broadcaster, dramatist and novelist, culminating as Head of Broadcasting Resources at the Irish broadcaster RTÉ. Perhaps propitiously, his 1945 series of reports for the Irish Times, ‘Front Line of Europe’, examined the rapid sovietisation of the east of the continent, just as his infant son entered the post-War world.

From 1946 to 1952, Jack White served as London editor of the Irish Times, before returning to Ireland. The family settled in Booterstown, County Dublin. (Stephen’s Donegal-born mother Edna—who had likewise been a member of the Trinity Players drama group—continued to live there until her death in 2009.) Like his parents, Stephen had a distinguished academic career at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1967 with a 1st class Moderatorship degree (BA) in Politics and Modern History. Alongside his academic work was also a streak of radicalism, and he served as an effective President of the Union of Students of Ireland.

Stephen’s pride in his Irish roots remained intense, but it was a Scottish city—Glasgow—with which he became synonymous. In 1973, supervised by the doyen of Sovietologists, Alec Nove (1915–1994), he completed his first doctorate (in Soviet Studies) at the University of Glasgow. He stayed at the University for the duration of his career, as Lecturer (1971–1985); Reader (1985–1991); Professor (1991–2017, in the named James Bryce Chair of Politics); and, following retirement, Professor Emeritus (2017–2023). He served as a highly regarded head of department in the 1990s, and remained to the last a staunch defender of the role of the Senate and values of academic collegiality.

Alongside his permanent posts in Glasgow, he also held visiting positions and fellowships in a wide range of other establishments, including: the Open University; University of Strathclyde; Balliol College Oxford; Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples; the Institute of Applied Politics, Moscow; the Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University; the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna; and the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Bologna. He also served as president of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) from 1994 to 1997. Rather unusually, he attained two further doctorates after his first: a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford in 1987; and a LittD from his alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, in 2001. He was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2002 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.

Trinity College Dublin’s alumni page described Stephen White as ‘the most prolific author on Russian and Soviet themes in these islands’¹ and it would be difficult to argue with this assessment. He produced nearly 500 publications, not including book reviews and miscellaneous newspaper articles, from 1972 to 2017. Amongst these were frequent contributions (22 single- or co-authored research articles, and numerous book reviews) to the pages of Europe-Asia Studies and its predecessor Soviet Studies, on whose Editorial Board he also sat for 40 years. He was additionally the chief and managing editor of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, now East European Politics, and a member of the editorial boards of several other prominent journals, including Comparative European Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Slavonica, Perspectives on European Politics and Society and International Politics.

The common thread that united most of his research was a fascination with what was then known as the Eastern Bloc, primarily the Soviet Union and Russia. In the early 1970s, he spent a year of his doctoral studies researching in Moscow, also traversing the Trans-Siberian railway. For the rest of his career, he regularly returned to Russia and its successor states, visiting for the last time in 2015.

Much of his early research was historical in nature, focused on the Soviet Union’s nascent foreign relations in the early 1920s. Alongside a plethora of specialised articles on this question, from both Soviet and capitalist countries’ perspectives (for example, White 1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1976, 1984a), he published two full-length books based on the research for his Glasgow and Oxford dissertations. Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution (White 1979a) examined the dilemma of whether containment of Soviet Russia was best achieved by isolation or engagement, and how to confront it without being drawn into direct conflict. As the name suggests, The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet–Western Relations, 1921–1922 (White 1985a) examined events surrounding the Genoa Conference of 1922. It questioned the conventional wisdom that the Conference was an unmitigated failure, and traced the developments that led to the signing of the bilateral Treaty of Rapallo between Europe’s ostracised powers, Germany and Soviet Russia, rather than a multilateral détente. Looked at from the perspective of 2024, perhaps a browse of antiquarian bookshops for second-hand copies of White’s early works might be useful to present-day policy-makers; as the adage goes, those who fail to read history are often doomed to repeat it.

Alongside his historical research, the other main strand of White’s work in the 1970s and 1980s concerned socialisation processes in the Soviet Union. Almost exactly half a century ago, his first article in the pages of this journal’s predecessor, Soviet Studies (White 1974d), was on the topic of ‘Contradiction and Change in State Socialism’. Like his next two articles in the journal (White 1977, 1980), it questioned the effectiveness of co-optation and political education. Reflections on the nature of the Soviet system were also the central themes of two of his earliest non-historical books, The USSR: Portrait of a Superpower (White 1978) and Political Culture and Soviet Politics (White 1979b). The latter was, at the time, the first full book-length study of the Soviet political culture. The methodological problems of separating out national and systemic factors from each other in communist political cultures was a question he returned to in later work (White 1984b).

Much of his research in the 1980s focused on a broader comparative understanding of communist systems, whether digging into the mechanisms by which their institutions functioned in practice (White 1982, 1990a, 1991) or measuring difference and similarity between incarnations of state socialism (Nelson & White 1982; White et al. 1982; White 1983; Simons & White 1984). As perestroika developed, so also did his focus on the electoral and democratic changes in the country—the subject that would be the backbone of his research in the following decades. Whereas the title of his article on the 1984 Supreme Soviet election, ‘Non-Competitive Elections and National Politics’, reflected the moribund nature of the event in question (White 1985b), two years later his review of recent literature on the reforming USSR was more optimistically entitled, ‘Winds of Change in Moscow’ (White 1987). The unexpected speed with which these winds blew is effectively encapsulated in the titles of his next three tomes: Gorbachev in Power (White 1990b), Gorbachev and After (White 1992) and After Gorbachev (White 1993).

White’s background as a political scientist with historical training meant that his transition to studying the post-Soviet Russian situation was impressive, assured and nuanced. Aside from the welcome opportunity to tie the study of Soviet successor states into the wider examination of comparative political systems, it brought opportunities to consult newly-opened archives; to speak with Russian policy-makers directly; to work more closely with colleagues in the country; and—above all—to ask ordinary Russians what they thought of their institutions and living conditions.

Building on a longstanding interest in elites (Mawdsley & White 1990, 2000), he was able to take advantage of the new possibilities for direct interaction with surviving members of the Soviet leadership from the 1960s to the 1980s, and for collaboration with Russian scholars. The combination of these two things was an oral archive of interviews without parallel, including with former Soviet ministers, Party first secretaries and even a former chairman of the KGB (White et al. 1996). He co-published several studies on the changing nature of the post-Soviet elite (Kryshtanovskaya & White 1996, 2005; White & Kryshtanovskaya 2003, 2005), in a particularly fruitful collaboration with a Russian colleague that led also to a visiting professorship at the Institute of Applied Politics in Moscow.

The late-blooming ‘behavioural revolution’ in post-Soviet area studies, facilitated by the collapse of communism, allowed the study of public opinion in a manner not previously possible. Working with colleagues whose quantitative skills complemented his own detailed country and contextual knowledge, such studies formed a significant corpus of White’s research from the early 1990s to the end of his career. Perhaps the most notable outputs of this genre were the seminal 1997 book How Russia Votes (White, Rose & McAllister 1997), and Values and Political Change in Postcommunist Europe (Miller et al. 1998), as well as shorter studies with a wide range of collaborators looking at electoral behaviour and public attitudes (for example, White & Kryshtanovskaya 1993; White et al. 1994; White, Wyman & Oates 1997; Wyman et al. 1995; Rose et al. 2001).

From the turn of the century onwards, he commissioned regular biennial national representative surveys in Russia and its neighbours, supported mainly by ESRC-funded projects with occasional co-funding from Australian- and Irish-based research bodies and universities. These formed a rich primary source of empirical data, charting changing attitudes towards politics, foreign policy, the economy and society. Analysis of Russian public opinion and electoral behaviour was the subject of many of his subsequent studies (for example, White & McAllister 2003; McAllister & White 2008a, 2008b, 2011). His focus on Russian politics in the Putin era also encompassed studies of the changing electoral system (White & Kryshtanovskaya 2011) and questions of electoral integrity, protest and disengagement (White 2005; McAllister & White 2011; White 2011a; White & Feklyunina 2011; White & McAllister 2014).

Perceiving, perhaps earlier than most, the potential new dividing lines arising from European Union and NATO expansion, he also led a series of research projects examining the implications of NATO expansion in what he termed the new ‘outsider’ states. This led to a deeper focus in his research on the post-1991 fates of other communist and post-communist systems, most notably Ukraine and Belarus (White et al. 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008, 2012) and, latterly, China (McAllister & White 2017; White et al. 2017). His last major single-authored monograph, Understanding Russian Politics (White 2011b), was a 466-page study (colloquially referred to during the preparation phase as ‘The Mont Blanc Project’) that drew together much of his research on post-communist Russia in a readable and comprehensive manner, aimed both at the classroom and the research community.

This review covers only just over a tenth of his lifelong output, but gives an overview of its breadth. One project that, unfortunately, he did not complete, was a monumental (in both senses of the word) study of the post-1991 fates of Lenin statues around the world. For many years, he adapted conference trips, study visits and even family holidays around the quest to photograph as many of these as possible (and establish the stories behind them). Many colleagues will have a favourite memory of how they were drafted in to assist with this task. For the present author, it involved a six-hour round trip together through a Swedish forest in a blizzard, in search of a cast of the Soviet leader that had been sent from Lithuania to a Scanian plywood factory as part-payment for a timber consignment during the economic crisis of the 1990s. A fascinating discussion and dinner with the owner of the statue ensued, suitable photographic evidence was collected, and we returned at 2 o’clock in the morning from our icy adventure. ‘That was one for the scrapbook’, Stephen opined with some satisfaction, as we drew in at his hotel.

Stephen White’s attention to detail was legendary. Colleagues marvelled at the speed with which he could offer cogent and comprehensive comment on a text; the distance from which he could spot an error in a university policy document; and his punctiliousness in authenticating archival accuracy. In the introduction to Understanding Russian Politics, he noted his preference for consultation of the printed newspaper collections in the Historical Library in Moscow rather than the increasingly available digital versions of the same material, ‘not … because of any obscurantism, but because sources of this kind [electronic newspaper articles] do not contain page references or (usually) graphics, may disappear or otherwise become unavailable, and in a small but disturbing number of cases may differ from the printed original’ (White 2011b, p. xi). A strong empiricist, he dug deeply to uncover the historical truth, wherever history had inadvertently buried it. A perpetual bugbear, for example, was that the fluid party affiliations of candidates in the hastily-arranged 1993 State Duma election led to different accounts—even in official documents—of its results. Still puzzling over this question 20 years after the event, he embarked during one of his Moscow trips on a constituency-by-constituency recount from local and contemporary archive sources, producing a list that—in all probability—was a more accurate summary of the 1993 election outcome than that held by the Central Electoral Commission itself.

For such a prolific researcher, his ability to assimilate exceptionally large amounts of information very quickly—in several languages—was a highly useful skill. On one occasion, his suitcase went missing on the outward leg of a transatlantic conference trip. He was less concerned about having nothing to wear than having nothing left to read. Having liberally interpreted the standard guidance that one was allowed to take ‘enough reading material for the journey’, he had packed six books in his hand luggage, and read them all before landing. This same ability to swiftly see the underlying patterns in troves of information allowed him also to recount obscure and often surreal details in his well-crafted narratives. In After Gorbachev (White 1993, p. 126), for instance, we could read about a 1989 experiment reported in Literaturnaya Gazeta in which 24 out of 30 cats refused to touch the standard-issue Soviet sausage-meat; and in Russia Goes Dry (White 1996, p. 124), about the theft during the mid-1980s anti-alcohol campaign of 140,000 rubles-worth of sugar in Dzhambul in Kazakhstan, the mastermind behind which turned out to be none other than the director of the local sugar factory himself. These apparently disparate points of data illustrated an overarching point that was confirmed by the official data to which he also referred: that the reforms of perestroika were unravelling.

He always took as solid starting points the established theoretical frameworks, and placed great store on the systematic collection of data, of which there was never too much available. Over his 45 years of travelling, he accumulated a collection of primary material on the Soviet Union and Russia as impressive as any in the world. (In some cases, more so: a colleague once fell over a copy of the definitive history of the Belarusian tractor industry on the floor of his office, and was proudly informed that not even the Bodleian had such a volume!) Said office at the University of Glasgow was piled from floor to ceiling with books, offprints, documents, posters, souvenirs and pamphlets. The uninitiated visitor, far less the fire inspector, could barely get through the door; but he had a perfect mental map of what was where, and when it had been obtained. Using skills of office archaeology, he could dig directly to the relevant point in the accumulation of paper (the Brezhnev-, Andropov-, Chernenko-, Gorbachev-, Yel’tsin- or Putin-era layers, as we called them; the Medvedev years had only a thin stratum) and locate any given document in seconds. At least the same amount of material was handed on to others for their edification and education, frequently purchased from his own pocket on his travels and left in a pigeon-hole, or posted, on his return.

From this academic review of his works, the reader could gain the impression that Stephen White’s life was dedicated to serious scholarship alone. But this would give a false impression of his wide range of interests and the multifaceted nature of his personality. He was a generous donor to libraries, and to the arts more generally, enjoying performances by Scottish Opera and endowing a seat in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal. A wider interest in the arts was also the inspiration for visually-striking The Bolshevik Poster (White 1988), still on sale in airports and even Moscow bookshops 20 years later. He took his scholarship extremely seriously, but had a lively sense of humour and pithy turn of phrase. He was always trying to understand the world’s complications, but could explain its complexities simply. Generations of students had their interest in current affairs sparked by his lectures. He had high expectations of himself and others; but delighted in the success of those whom he had mentored. Over 30 former doctoral students and research assistants (many of whom themselves went on to successful careers in academia and beyond) can attest to the benefits of his thorough training. He lived life in a hurry—but had the patience to delve deeply and systematically through an archive or into a research problem. When his days of hurrying ended abruptly following a debilitating stroke in 2015, he adapted (albeit reluctantly) to the slower pace of life, but remained very much alert to what was going on in the world. For the present author, some of the most vivid memories remain fireside chats in his home during these post-stroke years. He saw his colleagues and collaborators as an extended family, but it was his own family—not least Ishbel, with whom he celebrated a golden wedding anniversary in the final year of his life, and son Alex, a successful filmmaker—whose company gave him the greatest pleasure, whose achievements made him most proud, and who supported him most in all his endeavours.

We have lost a mentor, friend and colleague. He will be much-missed—but leaves vivid memories amongst all who knew him, and a legacy that will survive for many years to come.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek S. Hutcheson

Derek S. Hutcheson, Professor of Political Science, Department of Global Political Studies, Faculty of Culture and Society, Malmö University, 205 06 Malmö, Sweden. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 ‘Political Science Alumni’, Trinity College Dublin, available at: https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/alumni/notable-alumni/, accessed 6 February 2024.