HAROLD Shukman, a Russian historian at Oxford University who wrote books on Lenin and Stalin, has died aged 81.

Mr Shukman was University Lecturer in Modern Russian History and a Fellow of St Antony’s College.

He wrote books on Rasputin and the Russian Revolution and some of his most important work was done as a translator, including translations of Dmitri Volkogonov’s books on Stalin.

Mr Shukman was born in March 1931 in London, and came from a family of Jewish immigrants who had escaped poverty in the Russian empire before the First World War .

His father David started a new life as a tailor in London and after leaving school Mr Shukman joined Standard Telephones as a trainee radio engineer.

He then completed two years national service as a Russian interpreter with the RAF.

The experience prompted Mr Shukman to pursue his academic interest in Russia, and he went on to gain a first at Nottingham University in Russian and Serbo-Croat.

While at Nottingham, he took part in the first post-war visit to the Soviet Union by British students in 1954.

His ambition was to write a doctorate on the Jewish Labour Bund, the socialist political movement in pre-revolutionary Russia.

He later moved to Oxford with wife Ann, a scholar of Russian literature whom he married in 1956. They had three children, David, Henry and Clare.

Mr Shukman became a senior scholar at St Antony’s College in 1958 and, three years later took a PhD on Russian-Jewish revolutionary history.

After a year as Astor Fellow at Harvard and Stanford in the United States, Dr Shukman returned to St Antony’s as a Junior Research Fellow and stayed at the college until his retirement in 1998.

He wrote a popular textbook on Lenin and the Russian Revolution and co-wrote A History of World Communism in 1975 with Bill Deakin, the Warden of St Antony’s, and HT Willetts.

After he and Ann divorced, Dr Shukman married Barbara, a professional artist, in 1973. He died of cancer in July and is survived by his second wife, his children and three stepchildren.