Sheila Fitzpatrick is a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia. Her books The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31 (1978), Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-34 (1979) and The Russian Revolution (1982) were foundational to the field of Soviet social history. She taught for many years at the University of Chicago, before returning to Australia, the country of her birth. She is the author of two volumes of memoir, My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood and A Spy in the Archives, part of which was first published in the LRB. Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War is out now.
Remember perestroika? That was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated experiment in reform in the late 1980s which ended with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perestroika story, as we read it in the West, was about an enlightened Soviet leader’s effort to democratise internally, while at the same time ending the Cold War. The first part failed; the second succeeded, but...
Idon’t think I ever dobbed anybody in – or if I did, I would have told myself I was doing something else. Dobbing is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one’s fellow subalterns. I’m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been...
‘The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.’ The subtitle of Sergey Radchenko’s book makes it sound like an aspirant bestseller from the height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books...
Soviet dissidents saw things differently from those around them and asserted their right to do so. This was a phenomenon of the post-Stalin period, and specifically of the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s: the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Thaw, which happens to be the period in which I first encountered the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in Moscow. Naturally their...
‘Born of the devil and filled with the devil’s blood’ was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s typically over the top dismissal of the Gulag medical system, which he had encountered at first hand in his years as a prisoner. In his view, the doctors, however good their intentions, were powerless in a system whose raison d’être was to maximise labour extraction without...
Sheila Fitzpatrick talks to Tom about the perils of doing archive research in the Soviet Union, how she used Moscow telephone directories to investigate Stalin’s purges, and the multiple passports and...
In 1943, the Allies founded the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to care for civilians and the displaced and to help military authorities get them back ‘home’. Very quickly...
In 1989, the Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, well known to readers of the LRB, was on a plane when the passenger next to her struck up a conversation. She’d been watching him write...
We were ‘milk-drinkers’ by comparison, Vyacheslav Molotov, for many years Stalin’s deputy, said of Stalin’s inner circle. ‘Not one man after Lenin … did...
At the climax of the last of the great Stalinist show trials in the late 1930s, Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet prosecutor general, declared that the ‘masks’ had been ‘torn...
It was not until the 1970s that ‘Soviet studies’ evolved into ‘Soviet history’. The totalitarian model, with its focus on government control of an inert population, gave...
I recently received a letter from a German theatre director, objecting to a passage of my book The File in which I wrote that, back in the Stalinist Fifties, an East German friend of mine had...
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