Sheila Fitzpatrick | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1941-06-04)4 June 1941 (age 84) |
| Citizenship | Australian, American |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne St Antony's College, Oxford London School of Slavonic and East European Studies |
| Occupations | Historian, academic |
| Known for | Works on thehistory of modern Russia, thehistory of Soviet Union, and theStalinist period |
| Writing career | |
| Genre | History |
| Subject | Soviet Union |
| Literary movement | People's history |
| Notable works | Beyond Totalitarianism Everyday Stalinism Stalin's Peasants |
| Notable awards | Mellon Foundation Award |
| Relatives | Brian Fitzpatrick |
| Website | |
| sydney | |
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick (born 4 June 1941) is an Australian historian, whose main subjects arehistory of the Soviet Union andhistory of modern Russia, especially theStalin era and theGreat Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" ofCommunist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept oftotalitarianism and highlighted the differences betweenNazi Germany and theSoviet Union in debates aboutcomparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
Fitzpatrick isprofessor at theAustralian Catholic University (Melbourne),honorary professor at theUniversity of Sydney, and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at theUniversity of Chicago. Prior to this, she taught Soviet history at the University of Texas at Austin and was theBernadotte Everly Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is considered a founder of the field of Soviet social history.
Sheila Fitzpatrick was born inMelbourne in 1941, the daughter of Australian authorBrian Fitzpatrick and his second wife Dorothy Mary Davies.[1] Her younger brother was the historianDavid P. B. Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick's first marriage to Alex Bruce, a fellow University of Melbourne student, soon ended. Her second marriage to the political scientistJerry F. Hough, from 1975 to 1983, ended in divorce. While living in the United States, Fitzpatrick married the theoretical physicist Michael Danos (1922-1999).[2]
Fitzpatrick attended theUniversity of Melbourne (BA, 1961) and received her doctorate fromSt Antony's College, Oxford (1969), with a thesis entitledThe Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky (1917–1921). She was a Research Fellow at theLondon School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1969 to 1972.[3]
Fitzpatrick is a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAustralian Academy of the Humanities. She is a past president of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the American Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies. In 2002, she received an award from theMellon Foundation for her academic work. From September 1996 to December 2006, Fitzpatrick was co-editor ofThe Journal of Modern History withJohn W. Boyer andJan E. Goldstein. In 2012, Fitzpatrick received both the award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and theAmerican Historical Association's award for Scholarly Distinction,[4] the highest honour awarded in historical studies in the United States.[5] In 2016, Fitzpatrick won the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction for her bookOn Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015).[6]
She spent fifty years living outside Australia. This included periods in Britain, the Soviet Union,[5] and twenty years in the United States, before moving back to Australia in 2012.[7] She won the 2012Magarey Medal for biography for her memoirMy Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood.[8] A second volume of her memoirsA Spy in the Archives was published in 2013. In 2017, Fitzpatrick published a memoir-biography of her late husband Michael Danos,Mischka's War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s, which was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction in 2018.[9] In addition to her research, she plays the violin in orchestras and chamber music groups.[5]
Fitzpatrick has been awarded Discovery Grants by theAustralian Research Council for joint projects in 2010 withStephen G. Wheatcroft forRethinking the History of Soviet Stalinism, in 2013 withMark Edele forWar and Displacement: From the Soviet Union to Australia in the Wake of the Second World War, and in 2016 with Ruth Balint and Jayne Persian forPostwar Russian Displaced Persons arriving in Australia via the China Route.[5] Since her return to Australia, in addition to continuing her research and writing on Soviet history, such asOn Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics,[10][11] Fitzpatrick has been working and publishing onAustralian immigration, particularly displaced persons afterWorld War II and during theCold War,[7] such asWhite Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia.[12][13][14]
Writing inThe American Historical Review, Roberta T. Manning reviewed Fitzpatrick's work, stating: "In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sheila Fitzpatrick almost singlehandedly created the field of Soviet social history with an impressive series of pioneering, now classic studies:The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (1978),Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (1979), andThe Russian Revolution (1982). Book after book opened entirely new areas of research, explored old subjects from new perspectives, and forever altered the way experts perceived the USSR between 1917 and the outbreak of World War II."[15]
Her research focuses on the social andcultural history of theStalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life, and the social and cultural changes inSoviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s. In her early works, she focused on the theme ofsocial mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period.[16][17][18] Despite its brutality,Stalinism as apolitical culture would have achieved the goals of a democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of thepurges rather than its beneficiaries, as thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during thefirst five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government, and the leadership of theAll-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as a consequence of theGreat Purge.[19] For Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920s and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic, and the industrial communities is explained in part by aclass struggle against executives and intellectual bourgeois. The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and theGreat Turn found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit.[20] In this vision, Stalinist policy was based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.[19]
InBeyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Fitzpatrick andMichael Geyer disputed the concept oftotalitarianism, stating that it entered political discourse first as a term of self-description by theItalian Fascists and was only later used as a framework to compareNazi Germany with theSoviet Union, which were not as monolithic or as ideology-driven as they seemed. Without calling them "totalitarian", they identified their common features, including genocide, an all-powerful party, a charismatic leader, and pervasive invasion of privacy; however, they stated thatNazism and Stalinism did not represent a new and unique type of government but rather can be placed in the broader context of the turn to dictatorship in Europe in the interwar period. The reason they appear extraordinary is because they were the "most prominent, most hard-headed, and most violent" of the European dictatorships of the 20th century. They stated they are comparable because of their "shock and awe" and sheer ruthlessness but underneath superficial similarities were fundamentally different, and "when it comes to one-on-one comparison, the two societies and regimes may as well have hailed from different worlds."[21]
AcademicSovietology afterWorld War II and during theCold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of theSoviet Union,[22] stressing the absolute nature ofJoseph Stalin's power.[23] The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level.[24] Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces."[25] Fitzpatrick was one of a number of "revisionist school" historians who challenged the traditional approach toSoviet history, as outlined by political scientistCarl Joachim Friedrich, which stated that the Soviet Union was atotalitarian system, with thepersonality cult, and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.[26][27]
As the leader of the second generation of the "revisionist school", or "revisionist historians", Fitzpatrick was the first to call the group of historians working on Soviet history in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist school] historians." Fitzpatrick called for asocial history that did not address political issues and adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state, hence "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature."[28] Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge and defended the practice of social history "without politics", as most young "revisionist school" historians did not want to separate the social history of the Soviet Union from the evolution of the political system.[19] Fitzpatrick explained that in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."[29]
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| Year | Review article | Work(s) reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Fitzpatrick, Sheila (September 2014)."'One of Us': The Spy Who Relished Deception".Australian Book Review.364:27–28. | Macintyre, Ben (2014).A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. Bloomsbury Publishing.ISBN 9781408851739. |
| 2020 | Fitzpatrick, Sheila (6 February 2020)."Which Face? Emigrés on the Make".London Review of Books.42 (3):7–9. | Tromly, Benjamin (2019).Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia. Oxford University Press.ISBN 9780198840404. Reddaway, Peter (2020).The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960–90. Brookings Institution.ISBN 9780815737735. |
| 2020 | Fitzpatrick, Sheila (10 September 2020)."Whatever Made Him".London Review of Books.42 (17):9–11. | Wagner, Izabela (2020).Bauman: A Biography. Polity.ISBN 9781509526864. |
| 2021 | Fitzpatrick, Sheila (January–February 2021). "Knotty problems : an examination of Europe's displaced persons".Australian Book Review.428: 12, 14. | Nasaw, David (2020).The last million : Europe's displaced persons from World War to Cold War. Allen Lane. |
Making use of newly discovered Russian-language archives and drawing on a lifetime's study of Soviet history and politics, Professor Fitzpatrick examines the early years of a diverse Russian-Australian community and how Australian and Soviet intelligence agencies attempted to track and influence them. While anti-communist 'White' Russians dreamed a war of liberation would overthrow the Soviet regime, a dissident minority admired its achievements and thought of returning home.
Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader'. There was of course an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled unquestioningly by his subordinates.
Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In hisOrigins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
... the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
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