
Sheila FitzpatrickThe University of Sydney · Department of History
Sheila Fitzpatrick
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Publications (105)
The Russian Revolution has long been a subject of controversy among Russian/Soviet historians, both in the West and Russia/the Soviet Union. Now that the centenary has arrived, conferences are being held widely in Europe and the Americas, but less widely in the Russian Federation. For Putin’s regime, with its ambiguous relationship to the Soviet pa...
In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union made great efforts to persuade its former citizens among the “displaced persons” (DPs) resettled in Australia after the war to repatriate. They sent two undercover military intelligence men to Canberra to identify DPs who might be interested in returning, offer them free passages, and organize the repatriation....
In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union made great efforts to persuade its former citizens among the “displaced persons” (DPs) resettled in Australia after the war to repatriate. They sent two undercover military intelligence men to Canberra to identify DPs who might be interested in returning, offer them free passages, and organize the repatriation....
One of Platonov's closest friends was Igor Sac, a colleague of many years in the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment. With their lives and work, Platonov and Sac are chroniclers of the early Soviet Union. Platonov was deeply marked by the Utopian ideas of the Russian Revolution. For Sac, his experience in the civil war was decisive. Both shared...
Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until hi...
The opening of formerly closed and classified archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a remarkable experience for historians working in this field. Our data base abruptly expanded in a quantum leap, changing our situation from one roughly comparable to that of researchers on early modern Europe (working with the limited rang...
Millions of people were displaced as a result of the Second World War. Most were repatriated, but a ‘hard core’ of almost a million refused repatriation, awaiting resettlement outside Europe. These included many from the Baltic states, forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The essay presents a case study of three Latvians who found t...
T. H. (Harry) Rigby (1925–2011) was the Sovietologist that everybody liked, regardless of political, national, or any other kind of dividing lines. It was easy to see why: he was such a benign person, friendly and unassuming, with a sly sense of humor, nonpolemical but willing to argue, generous in sharing his remarkable knowledge of Soviet politic...
Over three decades, Stalin maintained a small, stable circle of power: it implemented Stalin's policies and survived the Stalinist terror relatively well in tact. This group harboured a deep mistrust of foreigners from the capitalist world and viewed the local intelligentsia with suspicion. In the latter, the party leaders saw competition for the m...
The unequal distribution of things was one of the basic iniquities of capitalism. Coupled with confidence in future abundance was the recognition that, for the short term, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and before the 'building of socialism' had been completed, things might be tough and goods scarce. So the immediate Revolutionary task was t...
The attitudes of disgruntled common citizens become clear in these documents. Politically unsophisticated, unimpressed by the liberal-minded intelligentsia, resentful that Soviet goods were being exported while people at home were deprived and hungry, the everyday critics were sometimes caught in acts of "sedition." Their crimes were cursing their...
There was support for the Soviet project in the Russian village (as well as opposition to it) in the 1920s. But then came collectivization, and all internal support apparently vanished - at any rate, it finds no reflection either in the historiography or in recently-published archival documents. This essay argues that support for collectivization d...
For many years, study of the Soviet political leadership usually took the form of Stalin biographies.1 This was natural, both in view of the comparative paucity of sources and Stalin’s unchallenged authority within the leadership from the end of the 1920s. It meant, however, that as far as the historiography was concerned, the Leader seemed to exis...
This lecture presents the text of the speech about the ending of the Russian Revolution delivered by the author at the 2008 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It addresses the problems for historians in determining the meaning and moral of a revolution. The lecture analogizes the French and Russian Revolution and suggests t...
This is a participant's account of the movement in Soviet history during the 1970s and 1980s known as "revisionism," which Sheila Fitzpatrick understands as an iconoclastic challenge by social historians to the dominance in Sovietology of political scientists and the totalitarian model. Particular attention is paid to the debates on the nature of S...
Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953. Ed. Clark Katerina and Dobrenko Evgeny , with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov. Documents translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. Annals of Communism Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xxx, 545 pp. Notes. Glossary. Index. $55.00, hard bound. - Volume 67 Issue 2 - Sheila...
Hannah Arendtʹs suggestion that social “atomization” was fundamental to totalitarian domination has appealed greatly to many scholars and intellectuals. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, it is a hypothesis whose empirical fit with the societies it purports to describe has never been seriously scrutinized. We took it as starting point for our co...
This essay is an account of the “revisionism” movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the Cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fa...
Our questions to Sheila Fitzpatrick, one of the most prolific and perhaps the single best-known historian of the Soviet period active in the world today, were posed at a time when she has been reflecting on her life and role within Soviet studies. Her memoirs of her Australian childhood, which end with her departure for graduate school at the Unive...
The article is a study of anti-parasite legislation in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, with special reference to the Russian law of 4 May, 1961. Beginning with a brief historical survey of Soviet legislation against social marginals, it explores the complex four-year process of drafting the law against parasitism, particularly the work of the Po...
The article is a study of anti-parasite legislation in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, with special reference to the Russian law of 4 May, 1961. Beginning with a brief historical survey of Soviet legislation against social marginals, it explores the complex four-year process of drafting the law against parasitism, particularly the work of the Po...
When revolutions happen, they change the rules of everyday life--both the codified rules concerning the social and legal classifications of citizens and the unwritten rules about how individuals present themselves to others. This occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which laid the foundations of the Soviet state, and again in...
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5.1 (2004) 27-54
As Kritika's attention to the topic indicates, it is time to think about new approaches to political history. The subject has languished long enough, particularly in the Soviet context. Soviet political history has been under a cloud for the past 20 or 30 years for a number of r...
This article examines the question of what can be gained from an investigation of people's emotions in Stalin's Russia. Such an investigation is inevitably limited by the type of sources available. However, the available sources on Soviet subjectivity provide some evidence of both “official” Soviet emotions (such as enthusiasm and righteous anger a...
Soviet history looks different today than it looked ten years ago. That is a truism, of course. We would be surprised, regardless of the time or occasion, if scholars were dealing with their subject in exactly the same way as they had done a decade earlier. Scholarly fashions and emphases change. Answers to new questions are sought, preoccupations...
Discussions of Russian history have frequently been marked by a preoccupation with the question of Russian ‘backwardness’, or, during the Soviet period from 1917 to 1991, with its obverse: the claim of the Soviet Union to play a vanguard role in world history. This paper offers a critical survey of twentieth-century Russian and Soviet history, and...
Patronage relations were ubiquitous in the Soviet elite. The phenomenon is perhaps most familiar in the political sphere, where local and central leaders cultivated and promoted their own client networks (the often-criticised ‘family circles’ [semeistva]).2 But it was not only rising politicians who needed patrons. Lacking an adequate legal system,...
Reinvention is what revolutions are all about. This has implications not only for the nation (society, polity) but also for the individual. When revolutionaries assume the task of remaking their society, they also pledge to remake themselves and their neighbors as citizens and patriots of the revolutionary state. In the case of the Bolshevik Revolu...
“Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers…If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians.” So wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, always a sharp-eyed anthropologist of Soviet everyday life. Historians who have encountered this treasure trove in Soviet archives newly opened over the...
The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to arc...
« Les dirigeants communistes, conformément à leur programme, accordent une très grande importance aux relations de classe. Le principe de classe est utilisé dans de nombreux contextes. Il est souvent nécessaire aussi de parler de déclassement et de groupes déclassés : “ l'intelligentsia petite-bourgeoise déclassée ” , “ la masse des personnes décla...
“Cadres decide everything,” Stalin proclaimed in 1935. The slogan is familiar, as is the image of Stalin as a politician skilled in the selection and deployment of personnel. But who were his cadres? The literature on the prewar Stalin period tells us little even about his closest political associates, let alone those one step down the political hi...
List of tables Acknowledgements Part I: 1. Education and Soviet society 2. The new Soviet school 3. The education system: problems of mobility and specialization 4. Professors and Soviet power Part II: 5. The 'great turning-point' of 1928-1929 6. Cultural Revolution and the schools 7. Mass education and mobility in the countryside 8. The making of...
Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the S...