Sheila Fitzpatrick

Biography

Fitzpatrick attended the University of Melbourne (BA, 1961) and received her doctorate from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a thesis entitled The Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky (1917–1921) (1969). She was a research fellow at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1969 to 1972.

Fitzpatrick is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the American Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies. In 2002, she received an award from the Mellon Foundation for her academic work. From September 1996 to December 2006, Fitzpatrick was co-editor of The Journal of Modern History with John W. Boyer and Jan 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 the American Historical Association's award for Scholarly Distinction, the highest honour awarded in historical studies in the United States. In 2016, Fitzpatrick won the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction for her book On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015).

She spent fifty years living outside Australia. This included periods in Britain, the Soviet Union, and twenty years in the United States, before moving back to Australia in 2012. She won the 2012 Magarey Medal for biography for her memoir My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood. A second volume of her memoirs A 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. In addition to her research, she plays the violin in orchestras and chamber music groups.

Fitzpatrick has been awarded Discovery Grants by the Australian Research Council for joint projects in 2010 with Stephen G. Wheatcroft for Rethinking the History of Soviet Stalinism, in 2013 with Mark Edele for War 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 for Postwar Russian Displaced Persons arriving in Australia via the China Route. Since her return to Australia, in addition to continuing her research and writing on Soviet history, such as On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Fitzpatrick has been working and publishing on Australian immigration, particularly displaced persons after World War II and during the Cold War, such as White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia.

Research

Writing in The 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), and The 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."

Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life, and the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s. In her early works, she focused on the theme of social 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. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of a democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, as thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government, and the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as a consequence of the Great Purge. 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 a class 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 the Great Turn found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. 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.

In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer disputed the concept of totalitarianism, stating that it entered political discourse first as a term of self-description by the Italian Fascists and was only later used as a framework to compare Nazi Germany with the Soviet 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 that Nazism 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."

Historiographical debates

Academic Sovietology after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union, stressing the absolute nature of Joseph Stalin's power. The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level. 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." Fitzpatrick was one of a number of "revisionist school" historians who challenged the traditional approach to Soviet history, as outlined by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, which stated that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian system, with the personality cult, and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.

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 a social 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." 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. 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."