A Conversation with Professor Terry Cox

DS: You have a very long association not only with Europe-Asia Studies but also with the old Institute of Soviet Studies that later became what is today Central and East European Studies. What can you tell us about your experiences during those years, and what particular memories or impressions do you have about the journal as it was, and some of its former editors? 

TC: Apart from reading some of the articles in it, I didn’t have very much to do with the journal as a student, but certainly it was a main feature of the Institute. The senior academics in the Institute were also the key figures in Soviet Studies.  

I came to Glasgow in 1969, 20 years after Soviet Studies was founded. The initial editors were Rudolf Schlesinger and Jack Miller, both of whom had a background in left politics of different sorts. I think Rudolf Schlesinger at one time was associated with the Austro-Marxist group in Vienna and presumably came to Britain as a refugee in the thirties, but I don’t know that for sure. Jack Miller, I think, had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for a while in the thirties. But when the Government, during the Cold War, decided to set up special centres for Soviet studies in Glasgow, Birmingham, London and also Swansea. In Glasgow, although it was the beginning of the Cold War they felt able to appoint these ‘old lefties’, so to speak, although, of course, they were also two of the leading experts in the field at that time. 

Schlesinger and Miller were joined a bit later by Alec Nove and I think all of them appeared on the inside cover as the editors of the journal for many years. I never knew Schlesinger. He died just after I arrived as a student. Actually, I attended his funeral just as a note of recognition from the students, but I never met him. Jack, I did meet. He didn’t teach me, but he was the first person I met when I arrived in Glasgow, looking for somewhere to live. I thought I’d call in at the Institute, and he was very generous with his time. He welcomed me and told me everything I needed to know as a newcomer. 

Thereafter I didn’t have much contact with him. He wasn’t someone who socialised with the students very much. Quite a retiring guy in many ways, although very well respected and well-known by his fellow academics. But in fact, he was keeping a watching brief, because a couple of years later I realised he knew all about the research I’d started doing for my PhD. Professor Karl-Eugen Wadekin, of the University of Giessen, had just got a big Volkswagen Stiftung grant for a study of Soviet society and economy, and Jack recommended me as someone looking at the rural sociology that had been developing from the 1960s in the Soviet Union. I joined that project and it enabled me to produce my first book, so I’m very grateful to Jack for that. 

Alec Nove was one of my two PhD supervisors (along with Hillel Ticktin), and he again was very helpful because he helped me define the topic. I had some ideas about questions of social class in relation to the Russian peasantry and Alec pointed me in the direction of the then little-known research of the Agrarian Marxists in the 1920s. 

In those days we didn’t have such regular supervision sessions as we do now. That all came later, and of course, Alec was globetrotting half the time, so quite often I didn’t see him for months on end. Nevertheless, he was a larger-than-life figure, you know. When he was in the Institute Building you knew about it, and he was extremely knowledgeable and generous with his time when you got him talking. An absolutely excellent lecturer and someone who was known around the world and I think probably boosted the reputation of Soviet Studies quite a lot. But again, as a student, I got no special insights. 

Then I left and got jobs mainly in the west of Scotland, and so I was able to still come and use the Soviet Studies library here and keep in touch with people. At some point—I’m not sure what year—Roger Clarke became the editor. It was very much part of his job, and he had a part-time lectureship alongside. I didn’t get to know Roger particularly well, except to know he was a really nice man and serious about his work. When he retired and I took over, he was very generous with his time. He showed me some manuscripts that he’d been editing, to let me see how he did it, and I could see how meticulous he was, how insightful and how good his judgment was at turning an article into something better than it had been when he received it. But he did all this with a red pen, on paper. He didn’t have a computer and he didn’t use email. 

By then, most authors were submitting their articles at least as email attachments, and the poor secretaries had to print all these out for Roger so that he could edit them manually with his pen. This caused great consternation down at the publishers Taylor and Francis! The production editor down there received not only paper copy, but paper copy with Roger’s handwriting on it as to what changes she had to then make to put it online. 

Also, back then the journal was not reviewed in the way we’d expect these days. The reviewing was mainly done by the Editorial Board, who were all Glasgow colleagues.  

Occasionally, I gather, Roger would send out to someone like Bob Davies in Birmingham to get advice on a particular article. But there was no double-blind anonymous reviewing: what you got was a cardboard folder with the article in it and sheets of paper on the front to write your comments. So, those coming later could see the opinions of those coming earlier. And they knew who the author was as well 

At some point—I’m not sure exactly when—Anton Muscatelli (who is just about to retire as Principal of the University but was then Dean of Social Sciences) took over as chair of the journal’s Management Board. I think he and the Board were rather concerned that Europe-Asia Studies—as it had become by then after the changes in Eastern Europe, was still edited and managed in the same rather loose way as Soviet Studies had been. So, when Roger retired, it was decided that someone from outside should come in and bring a new approach to editing the journal, and I was very pleased to get the job. Frankly, it’s been the highlight of my career. I’ve ended my career in the most enjoyable part of it. I enjoyed teaching, and I’ve got very fond memories of a lot of very good students and good colleagues, but editing the journal was something new that I came to, and I look back on it now as something very enjoyable and rewarding. 

DS: Your recollections of how things used to be done are very interesting. I can just about remember that, because I came to Glasgow in 2002 and I can still remember receiving the hard copy, as I was engaged as a reviewer fairly soon after getting here. As you said, it was a very different world. As Editor, you oversaw some big changes—the transition to online publishing and the step into the digital world, if I could put it that way. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and the challenges that went with it? And also talk about how the engagement with the scholarly community changed? You came in at an interesting time. It was 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than a decade since the demise of the USSR, and many countries of the former ‘Socialist Bloc’ were on the cusp of joining the EU. So, what kind of changes did you see in terms of coverage and authorship in the Journal? And in terms of engagement with the community more generally?  

TC: Dealing with the practical things briefly, the very first thing I should say is that very soon I was given the kind of admin support that I really needed to do the job, as a new post was created which initially we called editorial coordinator, I think. We appointed a wonderful colleague, Sarah Lennon, who helped me with all the practical aspects of editing the journal. Her background was in biochemistry, and then a Master’s in Information Science. So she wasn’t an expert in our field at all, but she very quickly got to grips with how to administer everything online and how to do a number of other things.  

The very first challenge we had was getting enough copy. We just about had enough articles for the first issue we put together ourselves, and I discovered when I went down to meet the publishers, Taylor and Francis, for the first time that they were rather concerned about where the journal was going. One of the first questions I got from Richard Delahunty, who was our main liaison person at Taylor and Francis at that time, was ‘do you think the best years of Europe-Asia Studies are in the past? You expanded when everyone was very interested in the end of Communist rule, the decline of the Soviet Union and so on. Are people so interested now?’ You know, they noticed that some of the journal issues were looking a bit thin. 

This took me by surprise a bit. So the first thing I did was to assure them that, yes, there’s a lot of interest still. I was sure there was as I’d been going to conferences and, in fact, I thought there was scope for even more interest because of the changes in Eastern Europe and accession to the EU. These were all interesting topics. 

So, with Sarah’s great help, we got enough copy, and she liaised with people in Taylor and Francis to work out the online system so that we had submissions and then reviews all done online. And then the final copy-edited version, which I did at that time, was sent back down to Taylor and Francis, all online. And within that, we instituted double-blind peer reviewing. We didn’t have a database of reviewers, so that was another really big job Sarah helped me with—you know, scouring publications and looking back at authors who’d written for us, or who’d reviewed books for us before, and eventually putting together a database and adding to it all the time. 

Also, there was no consistent presentation style to the journal. So we went through various conventions including spelling, punctuation, and the system of referencing among others. We stayed with the Glasgow Soviet Studies style of transliteration from Cyrillic, although we had some criticism about that, as people thought the American Library of Congress system was becoming more general, and that we should just adopt it. Also, the referencing system was a little bit controversial, because especially some historians didn’t like the idea that they couldn’t put all the references in footnotes. They didn’t like the name date system, which, coming more from a social science background, I opted to make our standard. I think I reassured them mostly by saying ‘well, if it’s something extra to the main text, you can still put that in the footnote, but just the referencing should be in brackets in the text with name and date’. One or two historians said they would never publish with us, but they finally came around. I remember this partly because we did a special issue to celebrate the career of Geoff Swain when he retired, and all the leading historians we invited were happy to contribute articles.¹  

The other practical thing was, we introduced a new cover design. I don’t know if people could go to libraries these days and see what the old cover looked like, but it was a rather grim-looking, dark brown background, with cream lettering. Taylor and Francis were very helpful there. Their design team came up with four different designs and the one we chose, which was supported almost unanimously, I think, in the editorial board, was the bright blue one with the sort of searchlights on different parts of Europe and Asia. I did try to get them to rejig it so that it covered more accurately all the bits of Asia and of Europe that we actually covered, but for technical reasons that didn’t seem to be possible. So the searchlights sort of shine on Scandinavia, for example, which we don’t cover, because, as readers will know, we cover the former communist-ruled countries of Europe and Asia. 

So those were the practical challenges. The other set of challenges really was—as you were asking—the links to the wider academic community. One of the first things that the publishers were very keen on, and I was keen on it, too, was to make Europe-Asia Studies better known by going to various meetings, academic conferences, also summer schools, and being available to give talks about Europe-Asia Studies. I did a lot of that sort of work. At conferences, the publishers provided funding for ‘meet the editor’ sessions, usually over a cup of tea or coffee and biscuits, or slightly more elaborate receptions occasionally, with wine in the evenings. We did that at a few international conferences, including the big American conference. 

The second thing was to improve our relations with BASEES, the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, which had fallen a bit by the wayside. When the journal was set up, the predecessor organisation to BASEES—NASEES, the National Association—provided an Editorial Advisory Board of leading people in the field, and they didn’t seem to have been consulted very much in later years, including over the very controversial decision to change the journal’s name from Soviet Studies to Europe-Asia Studies. I know from the records, from some of the correspondence, that it was a very controversial issue. I have some sympathy with the critics, because practically, trying to edit the journal, we did find that a lot of prospective authors didn’t really read the journal description and we had—possibly you still do—submissions on Japan or Portugal, or countries that really have no relation to our field. But anyway, there was a bit of fence-mending to do, but that was helped by the fact that I was on the Committee of BASEES at the time and also served as President for a few years. And the colleagues on the BASEES Committee, once they were asked again, were very pleased to be on the Advisory Board, and to offer advice, do reviewing and recommend us to authors, and I’m very grateful to some of the people around at that time who went out of their way to say ‘yes, we really like what you’re doing with the journal! We’re going to recommend you to our colleagues.’ The publishers were also very active in supporting this: almost every year they organised a wine and cheese reception and various events for the BASEES Conference, which helped a great deal. And obviously, there was publicity for the journal around the room when they were doing that. 

A third thing in terms of the wider community: fairly early on in my time as Editor—I think you [DS] had quite a lot to do with this—was the setting up of the network of universities on Russian East European Studies with the almost unpronounceable acronym [CRCEES: Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies—ed.].² That came in very useful, because there was something in the founding charter, or whatever it should be called, of the journal that the editorial board should be staff at the University of Glasgow, and there were definite gaps in our expertise. We had (and still have) great colleagues at Glasgow, very expert in their own fields; but there were some fields, especially economics, and some of the upcoming fields—European regional policy was one, Central Asia was another—where we didn’t really have at that time the expertise in Glasgow. So I proposed, and it was agreed by the Board of Management, that we could invite people from the partner universities in CRCEES. And some people were especially helpful there. In economics, Martin Myant, now retired but once at the University of West of Scotland; Bob Arnott at Caledonian University, another economist; a couple of colleagues from Strathclyde University, Martin Ferry and Irene McMaster, who filled in very definite gaps in terms of European regional policy; and over at St Andrews, Rick Fawn and Sally Cummings, who boosted our expertise in Central Asia and Rick also more widely on Russia and Eastern Europe. They were all examples of very helpful colleagues at that time. 

And finally, I think, in terms of the wider community, we decided to launch special issues of the journal and a lot of these involved people completely from outside, who came in as guest editors and put together an issue. And the editorial team here worked on it with them. It was very interesting to work with that wider range of people, and I think it was very good for the journal. The publishers decided after a while to bring out all the special issues as books. This gave them a kind of ‘second life’, and I’ve got very fond memories, especially of the ones where the guest editors were happy to work with me and I was invited down to initial seminars or conferences where the first versions of the papers were presented and discussed. For example, David Lane invited me down to Cambridge for his special issue on elites,³ Derek Averre and Katerina Wolczuk invited me down to Birmingham for their special issue on Ukraine⁴ and Markku Kivinen invited me to join him as co-editor of the special issue based on papers that came out of the big Russian modernisation project of the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki.⁵ 

Also I was able to edit a couple of special issues myself. I imposed a self-denying ordinance on myself that I wouldn’t write an article all the time I was editor, but I did write introductions to special issues that I edited, and I’ve got very fond memories of a couple of these. First, one on the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution in Eastern Europe, where I worked with a number of very eminent Hungarian scholars, including Janos Rainer, who at that time was Director of the History of the 1956 Revolution Institute in Budapest and was extremely helpful introducing me to other colleagues. They all came to Glasgow for a conference with the specialists here which I put together.⁶ 

Second was the special issue on the changes of 1989 in Eastern Europe. I wrote an introduction again and, (it’s the nearest I came to being an author) I included an interview I made with László Vass (a research colleague of mine and now recently retired as Rector of Budapest Metropolitan University). I wanted the wider world, or the academic world, to know about the role László’s role in what was called the ‘picnic on the border’ on the Hungarian-Austrian border in 1989.⁷ At that time László was a political aide to Imre Pozsgay, a leading figure on the reformist wing of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, and he had the role of representing the politicians at the picnic. I think the official position was that a lot of East German ‘tourists’ who were returning from holidays. In Eastern Europe, would not be allowed to cross the border into Austria, and then on into West Germany. However, they massed on the border and attended the picnic in the hope of getting across. And I think László is well known in certain circles for taking the senior policeman to one side for a cup of coffee at one point, as people sneaked across the border. After that it became more of a flow. I just wanted that story to be known, because he’d told it to me as we got to know each other.