Peter Frank obituary

Academic and broadcaster who made Russian politics intelligible to a British audience
peter frank
A professor of politics, Peter Frank also had interests in Russian literature, bird-watching, Yorkshire and the sea. Photograph: University of Essex

Professor Peter Frank, who has died aged 79, probably did more than anyone of his generation to engage the British public with the excitement and pain of Kremlin politics. As a broadcaster from the early 1970s for the BBC and then Channel 4, he showed the capacity to convey a mass of complex information in a way that everyone could understand. He made frequent appearances with Jon Snow in Channel 4 News's London studio and also on Red Square, Moscow. With his ready smile, he was a natural performer. At successive moments of political crisis, he supplied informed analysis and a voice of calm.

He also contributed to the seminars on the Soviet Union that Margaret Thatcher held before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and advised John Major on Russia's politics after the fall of the USSR.

Born into a working-class family in Whitby, North Yorkshire, in 1934, Peter made it to grammar school, but left at the age of 16. After employment as a bicycle mechanic, he did his national service with the Royal Engineers and was invited to join the army's intensive Russian-language course, or else be deployed to the Korean war or the Malaysian emergency. The skills he acquired through taking the first option enabled him to train as a teacher after being demobbed in 1954. Working in schools around Whitby, he studied at night for the A-levels that he needed to get into university.

In 1959, he went to Leeds University as a mature student. Alfred Dressler, his mentor in the Russian department, encouraged him to take a doctorate on the Bolshevik party central committee in 1917. He went on to work as a lecturer in Leeds and seemed set on a career as a historian.

But in 1968, the department of government at Essex University poached him. When Peter pointed out his lack of background in political science, the answer came back that he had the intellectual talent to re-tool himself. The department was the liveliest in Europe and had a commitment to statistical methods.

As Peter adapted to his new discipline of study, he focused on Russian politics below the level of the Kremlin and researched the collective profile of regional party bosses. Gradually he came to believe that his department's preferences in political science were of limited use for countries such as the USSR, where reliable quantitative data was either uncollected or kept secret.

This did not stop him researching the Communist party hierarchy from the politburo down to the lowest party cells. He and his former student Ronald Hill collaborated in writing up this material as The Soviet Communist Party (1984), which is still a standard account.

Peter was a warm, attentive supervisor. He was also a Whitby loyalist and invited doctoral students to join him there for long weekends in the university vacations, alternating walks to the abbey with afternoon discussions on Soviet communism. Visits to his favourite fish restaurant were obligatory. The social history of the coastal town was one of his preoccupations, and he interviewed elderly fishermen and women and collected documents and photos for his superb Yorkshire Fisherfolk (2002). 

He contributed to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, an organisation dedicated to advising countries undergoing a transition to democracy, and was a trustee of the John Smith Memorial Trust.

Peter's educational vocation was the springboard from which he dived into his multiple enthusiasms – and he was always eager to share them with others. He had a passion for bird-watching, and for Yorkshire and Russian literature. After retiring as professor of politics in 2001, he wrote a magnificent study of the marine artist JR Bagshawe, Sea Painter (2010).

He was proud of the achievements of his wife, Mary, whom he had married in 1960, and who was Labour mayor of Colchester in 1992-93. She survives him, as do their three children, Jonathan, Nicholas and Rachel.

Peter Frank, political scientist and broadcaster, born 6 May 1934; died 21 November 2013