A leading expert on Soviet history has set out to explore the complex personal factors that often drive research.

Sheila Fitzpatrick recently returned to her native Australia after a gap of nearly 50 years. She is now honorary professor of history at the University of Sydney, working on scholarly books about ¡°Stalin and his team¡± and the fate of displaced persons after the Second World War. She has also just published A Spy in the Archives: A?Memoir of Cold War Russia.

The book offers a vivid account of the daily trials of living and working in Moscow on a student exchange in 1966, where maps and telephone directories were unavailable and a sign in the university buffet read ¡°No milk. And won¡¯t be.¡± Helpful or flirtatious young men were best avoided, since they had probably been sent by the KGB. And the ruthlessness required on buses left such a mark that, back in Oxford, Fitzpatrick found herself ¡°shamelessly elbowing aside little old ladies in Sainsbury¡¯s¡±.

Notably hard on her younger self, she recalls an appeal to the director of some archives she wanted to consult, who ¡°looked [her] over ¨C a small 25-year-old whom all Russians instinctively classified as a mere girl, ill at ease with the language, lacking either feminine charm or masculine authority¡±. When he turned her down, she burst into tears, which unexpectedly proved ¡°exactly the right thing to do¡±. Grandly declaring ¡°grown-ups don¡¯t cry¡±, he granted her the access she was seeking.

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Paper chase

Once loose in the archives, Fitzpatrick writes that she became ¡°addicted to the thrill of the chase, the excitement of the game of matching my wits against that of Soviet officialdom¡±. She started researching Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet people¡¯s commissar of enlightenment (or minister of education and culture), and realised that ¡°the second level of Soviet politics was driven by conflicts based on bureaucratic interest¡±. This was backed up by conversations with Lunacharsky¡¯s adopted daughter, Irina Anatolevna Lunacharskaya, and his brother-in-law and assistant, Igor Alexandrovich Sats.

Sats in particular became a hugely important, quasi-paternal figure to Fitzpatrick: he introduced her to some people, warned her off others and, she freely admits, has deeply influenced her scholarly work ever since.

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¡°My first book owes an enormous amount to Igor,¡± she explains now, ¡°simply because I was writing about the particular ministry where he had been the assistant to the minister. Sometimes I found something opaque or pointing in a certain direction and there was actually a backstory Igor knew about, which made it quite different.¡±

As their friendship developed, however, Igor began to ¡°talk a great deal about the Stalin period, about what life was like, the strategies of survival, what happened to different kinds of people. When I came to write Everyday Stalinism [1999], an attempt to get the texture of urban Russia in the 1930s, Igor¡¯s footprint was all over it.¡±

Revisionist vanguard

Her sense of the ¡°conflicts based on bureaucratic interest¡± within Soviet policymaking helped to push Fitzpatrick into becoming one of the founders of the ¡°revisionist¡± school of Sovietology. This used detailed archival research to get beyond the official story and thereby challenged the ¡°totalitarian¡± model then dominant among Cold War political scientists.

When she moved to the US in 1972, Fitzpatrick soon found herself subject to ferocious attack and even smear campaigns.

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¡°The critics said that the revisionists were ¡®soft on communism¡¯,¡± she recalls, ¡°and minimised repression, monolithic Stalinist control and so on. There was a tendency to say that anyone whose main topic was not repression was missing the big issue about the Soviet Union.¡±

Rumours even made the rounds that she ¡°had a communist father, back in Australia, and that he had arranged for me to get into the archives¡± (he was actually a non-communist leftist with no Soviet connections).

As a young researcher, Fitzpatrick reflects, she was very ¡°strong on the notion of objectivity¡± and believed that her intensive work in the archives was bringing her ¡°closer to the truth than other people. Looking back you see very strongly the various personal factors that are there and mould your reaction to everything you come across.¡± Her new book is dedicated to untangling these perplexing questions.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com