Leonard Schapiro

Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was a British scholar of the origins and development of the Soviet political system. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies. Schapiro was best known for his study, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, though his early work on the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, was his most intellectually ambitious contribution to the field of Soviet studies. Because of his prominence in the field and his insistence on viewing the USSR through a normative lens, Schapiro accumulated his share of detractors, including those who were uncomfortable with his embrace of totalitarianism as a descriptor of Soviet rule and those who alleged that his reputed ties to British intelligence services made him little more than a political propagandist.