Sheila Fitzpatrick

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of the foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas, the book is an eye-opening account of day-to-day life in the blighted urban landscape of 1930's Russia

Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times : Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Everyday Stalinism

The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the twentieth century. Now, following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it is possible to step back and see the full picture. In this classic work, the author incorporates data from archives thatwere previously inaccessible not only to Western but also to Soviet historians, as well as drawing on important recent Russian publications such as the memoirs of one of the great survivors of Soviet politics, Vyacheslav Molotov. Impeccable in its scholarship and objectivity, the book tells a gripping story of a Marxist revolution that was intended to transform the world, visited enormous suffering on the Russian people, and, like the French Revolution before it, ended up by devouring its own children. In a concludingsection that will be of great interest to scholars in the field as well as the general reader, the author treats the Stalinist Great Purges as the last act of the drama of the Russian Revolution.

The Russian Revolution

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 his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families, vividly describing how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, whom they both feared and admired, but also constituted his social circle. Readers meet the wily security chief Beria, whom the rest of the team quickly had executed following Stalin’s death; Stalin’s number-two man, Molotov, who continued on the team even after his wife was arrested and exiled; the charismatic Ordzhonikidze, who ran the country’s industry with entrepreneurial flair; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin’s death. Among the book’s surprising findings are that Stalin almost always worked with the team on important issues and that after his death the team managed a brilliant transition to a reforming collective leadership. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin’s final years, On Stalin’s Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu—one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics

On Stalin's Team

In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was 'outed' by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britainandmdash;a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor. An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home. For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy. Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.

A Spy in the Archives

Yuri Slezkine

Asked shortly after the revolution about how she viewed the new government, Tatiana Varsher replied, "With the wide-open eyes of a historian." Her countrywoman, Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, expressed a similar need to take note: "I want to write about the way those events were perceived and reflected in the humble and distant corner of Russia that was the Cossack town of Korenovskaia." What these women witnessed and experienced, and what they were moved to describe, is part of the extraordinary portrait of life in revolutionary Russia presented in this book. A collection of life stories of Russian women in the first half of the twentieth century, In the Shadow of Revolution brings together the testimony of Soviet citizens and émigrés, intellectuals of aristocratic birth and Soviet milkmaids, housewives and engineers, Bolshevik activists and dedicated opponents of the Soviet regime. In literary memoirs, oral interviews, personal dossiers, public speeches, and letters to the editor, these women document their diverse experience of the upheavals that reshaped Russia in the first half of this century. As is characteristic of twentieth-century Russian women's autobiographies, these life stories take their structure not so much from private events like childbirth or marriage as from great public events. Accordingly the collection is structured around the events these women see as touchstones: the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918-20; the switch to the New Economic Policy in the 1920s and collectivization; and the Stalinist society of the 1930s, including the Great Terror. Edited by two preeminent historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, the volume includes introductions that investigate the social historical context of these women's lives as well as the structure of their autobiographical narratives.

Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War

In the Shadow of Revolution

Rewolucja rosyjska

A history of Soviet education policy 1921-34, this is a sequel to the author's highly praised Commissariat of Enlightenment.

Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale--the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society. This book is a lively and authoritative distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit. The acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick chronicles the Soviet Age--its rise, reign, and unexpected fall, as well as its afterlife in today's Russia. She underscores the many ironies of the Soviet experience: An ideology that claimed to offer humanity the reins of history wrangled with contingency. An avowedly internationalist and anti-imperialist state birthed an array of nationalisms. And a vision of transcending economic and social inequality and injustice gave rise to a country that was, in its way, surprisingly normal. Moving seamlessly from Lenin to Stalin to Gorbachev to Putin, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union provides an indispensable guide to one of the twentieth century's great powers and the enduring fascination it still exerts.

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

On a winter's day in 1943, 22-year-old Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight as he skied through Latvian woods-a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. The world was full of such atrocities, which makes Mischka's decision to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany all the more remarkable. Even more so when Mischka later discovered he was part-Jewish. But his was no ordinary life. He narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden. He then lived the precarious life of a Displaced Person in occupied Germany before heading north with the hope of crossing the border into Denmark, where he finally reunited with his mother Olga. He went on to become a member of the exceptional Heidelberg school of physics. They were both resettled in the US at the beginning of the 1950s, which is where, much later, he met, fell in love with and married Sheila Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick pieces together her late husband's story through diaries, correspondence and recollections- 'This is a historian's book but it's also a wife's book about her husband ... an offering of love that is also a search for knowledge.'

Mischka's War

When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays--two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here--which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.

Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia

The Cultural Front

In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was 'outed' by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britain—a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor. An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home. For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy. Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.

Spy in the Archives

Mark Edele

Atina Grossmann

The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union

Shelter from the Holocaust

White Russians, Red Peril

Now in a new edition, this provocative, highly readable work presents a fascinating look at events that culminated in the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the Revolution in its widest sense, Sheila Fitzpatrick covers not only the events of 1917 and what preceded them, but the social transformations brought about by the Bolsheviks.

Lynne Viola

Soviet and western history researchers present 16 essays on accessing and using a wide variety of sources pertaining to the Stalin era. Topics include archives, annual reports of industries, laws, legal journals, city directories, newspapers and journals, memoirs, and military sources. Appended to particular essays and to the volume as a whole are catalogues of specific documents and publications. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

New Directions

Stalinism

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 1991, when that state collapsed. Tear Off the Masks! is about the remaking of identities in these times of upheaval. Sheila Fitzpatrick here brings together in a single volume years of distinguished work on how individuals literally constructed their autobiographies, defended them under challenge, attempted to edit the "file-selves" created by bureaucratic identity documentation, and denounced others for "masking" their true social identities. Marxist class-identity labels--"worker," "peasant," "intelligentsia," "bourgeois"--were of crucial importance to the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources, Tear Off the Masks! offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.

Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia

Tear Off the Masks!

How does a daughter tell the story of her father? Sheila Fitzpatrick was taught from an early age to question authority. She learnt it from her father, the journalist and radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick. But very soon, she began to turn her questioning gaze on him. Teasing apart the many layers of memory, Fitzpatrick reveals a complex portrait of an Australian family against a Cold War backdrop. As her relationship with her father fades from girlhood adoration to adolescent scepticism, she flees Melbourne for Oxford to start a new life. But it's not so easy to escape being her father's daughter. My Father's Daughter is a vivid evocation of an Australian childhood; a personal memoir told with the piercing insight of a historian.

Memories of an Australian Childhood

My Father's Daughter

H διακεκριµένη ιστορικός Sheila Fitzpatrick καταπιάνεται µε τις δοµές εξουσίας στην ΕΣΣ? υπό τον Στάλιν και ανατρέπει πολλές από τις κρατούσες απόψεις. Ο Ιωσήφ Στάλιν ήταν ο αδιαµφισβήτητος ηγέτης επί δεκαετίες, τόσο στο εσωτερικό της χώρας όσο και για τον δυτικό κόσµο, µε αποτέλεσµα οι περισσότεροι ιστορικοί να αντιµετωπίζουν τους αξιωµατούχους του ως πειθήνια όργανα µε διακοσµητικό ρόλο. Όµως στην πραγµατικότητα αυτοί οι αξιωµατούχοι µοιράστηκαν σε έναν βαθµό την εξουσία και λειτούργησαν ως µία συλλογική οµάδα διακυβέρνησης από τα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’20 ως τον θάνατο του Στάλιν. Μετά από εκτεταµένη, πρωτότυπη έρευνα, η συγγραφέας παρουσιάζει πρώτη φορά σε βάθος αυτό τον στενό κύκλο. Περιγράφει πώς αυτοί οι σύντροφοι συνεργάζονταν στενά µε τον ηγέτη τους, τον οποίο φοβούνταν αλλά και θαύµαζαν: από τον Μπέρια, που η υπόλοιπη οµάδα φρόντισε να εκτελεστεί αµέσως µετά τον θάνατο του Στάλιν· τον Μόλοτοφ, που παρέµεινε µέλος της οµάδας ακόµα και όταν συνέλαβαν και εξόρισαν τη σύζυγό του· τον Ορτζονικίτζε, υπεύθυνο της βιοµηχανίας· τον Αντρέγεφ, που πήγαινε στις εκκαθαρίσεις ακούγοντας Μπετόβεν σε ένα φορητό γραµµόφωνο· ως τον Χρουστσόφ, που διέλυσε τελικά την οµάδα το 1957. Από τις Μεγάλες Εκκαθαρίσεις και τον B΄ Παγκόσµιο ως την παράνοια των ύστατων χρόνων του σταλινισµού, το βιβλίο παρουσιάζει µια ολότελα νέα εικόνα του Στάλιν µέσα στον περίγυρό του – µια εικόνα που αλλάζει την αντίληψή µας για τη διακυβέρνηση του σοβιετικού καθεστώτος.

Τα επικίνδυνα χρόνια της σοβιετικής πολιτικής

Οι σύμβουλοι του Στάλιν

Drawing on Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, this work analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village

Sheila Fitzpatrick

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