Professor Peter Brock (1920-2006)

SEER, Vol.85,No.2, April2007 Professor Peter Brock (I 920-2oo6) PETER DEBEAUVOIRBROCK, who died at his Toronto home on 28 Mav 2006, devoted his long scholarlylife to the pursuitof two interrelatedI causes: the struggle of the Eastern European peoples for liberation from alien rule, and opposition to war on a global scale. In both fields of historical inquiry he won international acclaim as a champion of oppressed or disadvantaged minorities. This humanitarian commitment had profoundly Christian roots. Peter's spiritual home lay in the Unitarian church, while his wife Carmen (nee Williamson, from Jamaica, who predeceased him) strengthenedhis association with the Society of Friends.It was as a member of the Anglo-AmericanQuaker reliefmissionto post-warPoland that he firstgained acquaintancewith the Slavic world. Born on Guernsey,Peter rejectedhis family'smilitarytraditionsandl became a pacifistwhile an undergraduateat ExeterCollege, Oxford.Ifr 194I-42 he servedfourmonths injail forrefusingconscriptionand then engagedin social work, firstin Britain and then abroad. In I948 he enrolled as a student at Krakow's ancientJagiellonian University, choosing as his thesis topic the career of Boleslaw Wyslouch (I855-1937 ), founderof the progressivePolishPeasantparty. Some yearslater he explained in this journal that 'largely due to the movement lecl by Wyslouch [...] the peasant became conscious of his nationalityancl gained political and social equality within the community' (SEER,30, I951, p. I69. For a bibliographyof his writings [c. 250 items], seeJohn D. Stanley, Scholarly Publications byPeter deBeauvoir Brock(Revised Listing), Toronto, 2006). On returningto BritainPeter followed up his Krakow doctorate with another from Oxford, which took him back to the fifteenthcentury and to the Czech lands. His study of the ideas of the Unity of Czech Brethren, later published by Mouton (The Hague, I957), remains the standard work on this sect, which in his words adopted 'the most radical position [...] during the Middle Ages towardsthe ever recurringproblem of the relationshipof the individual towards [. . .] the state',especiallyas to whether Christiansmight legitimatelyshed blood in war. Here Peter'stwo concernsneatlyoverlapped. Alas, these remarkablescholarly achievements did not earn him a universityappointmentin his native land. Condemned to drudgeryon the fringes of academe, he escaped by emigrating to Canada, ancd taught successively in Toronto, Alberta and New York (Columbia) before settling down permanently at the University of Toronto ancd PETER BROCK 323 takingup Canadian citizenship.By this time he had published,often in the Slavonic and East European Review,seminal articles on nineteenthcenturyPolishintellectualsthatgave a foretasteof his Polish Revolutionagy Populism (Toronto, I977). Here he demonstrated interalia that Polish emigres had anticipated many key ideas of the Russian narodniki, for which however they received little credit. Today the agrariansocialist programme, involving expropriation of noble estates and tilling the soil in common, has lost much of its appeal, but half a century ago it appearedto offera viable alternativeto state-imposedcollectivismand individualisticsmallholding.In any case Peterwas less interestedin the practicalapplicabilityof Populistdoctrine than in its historicalorigins. Sympathy for the underdog did not blind him to the dangerslatent in integral nationalism, as preached by Roman Dmowski's National Democrats, and in a classicessay of I969 he made clear his preference for a federalsolutionto Poland'sethnic problems.Unhappily, this ideal came to grief over twentieth-centurypower-politicalrealities.Keen to view Polish developments in regional perspective, and exploiting his formidablelinguisticskills,Peterbranchedout to examine the problems of the Lusatian Sorbs, Ukrainians and Slovaks:his pioneering study, TheSlovak National Awakening, appeared in Toronto in I976. Two years later he visited Hungary, where his research led to articles on the Nazarenesand Eugen Schmitt'scircleof Tolstoian anarchists.Likewise, a subsequent sojourn in India yielded an entire volume of essays on Mahatma Gandhi (I983). Though his writing now less frequently had an Eastern European focus, one of his most recent academic ventures was to co-edit Nation andHistogy (Toronto, 2006), an investigationinto Polish historiography from the Enlightenmentto the Second World War, in which he wrote on Stanislaw Kot (I885-1975). In the realm of Russian studies Peter was first attractedto the Dukhobors, whose beliefs led them to reject military service, and in I964 he printed in these pages a noteworthy inside account of that sect's crucial phase by V. Pozdniakov. In later years he turned to the tribulationsof Russian conscientious objectors duringand afterthe FirstWorldWar. Gratifyingly,post-Sovietscholars were now beginning to grapplewith...

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