My friend Peter Duncan, who has died aged 72, was a senior lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, where he was an expert in contemporary Russian politics and foreign policy from the late 1980s until his retirement in 2021.
During that time he also wrote two books on his specialist subjects: Soviet Union and India (1989) and Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (2000). One of the most knowledgable of Britain’s Russianists, in 2019 he made his expertise available to the House of Commons, which asked him to draw up a report on Russian political interference and money laundering in the UK.
