George Hugh Nicolas Seton-Watson, CBE, FBA (15 February 1916 – 19 December 1984) was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia.
Interned by the Italians after the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis in 1941, Seton-Watson was repatriated to Britain and later posted to the British special forces in Cairo, where he remained until 1944.
[4] Seton-Watson wrote most of his first major work, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 in Cape Town while on his way from Italy to Britain after the fall of Yugoslavia, finishing it in Cairo during the battle of El Alamein in 1942.
In 1951 he was appointed to the chair of Russian history at the University of London, where he remained until 1983,[5] exercising a major influence over British and American understandings of Russia during the Cold War.
[6] During a three-month fellowship, beginning in October 1984, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he became ill with pulmonary problems and was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital where he died three weeks later.