Sheila Fitzpatrick

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Sheila Fitzpatrick
Brian Fitzpatrick
Website
sydney.edu.au/arts/history/staff/profiles/sheila.fitzpatrick.php

Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick (born June 4, 1941) is an Australian

Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
.

Fitzpatrick is

honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Prior to this, she taught Soviet history at the University of Texas at Austin and was the Bernadotte Everly Schmitt
Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is considered a founder of the field of Soviet social history.

Family

Sheila Fitzpatrick was born in

Brian Fitzpatrick and his second wife Dorothy Mary Davies.[1] Her younger brother was the historian David P. B. Fitzpatrick
.

Fitzpatrick's first marriage to Alex Bruce, a fellow University of Melbourne student, soon ended. Her second marriage to the political scientist Jerry 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]

Biography

Fitzpatrick attended the

London School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1969 to 1972.[3]

Fitzpatrick is a member of 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,[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 book On 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,

Magarey Medal for biography for her memoir My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood.[8] 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.[9] In addition to her research, she plays the violin in orchestras and chamber music groups.[5]

Fitzpatrick has been awarded Discovery Grants by the

Australian immigration, particularly displaced persons after World War II and during the Cold War,[7] such as White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia.[12][13][14]

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."[15]

Her research focuses on the social and

Great 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]

In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Fitzpatrick and

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."[21]

Historiographical debates

Academic

personality 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 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."[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]

Bibliography

Books

  • The Commissariat of Enlightenment : Soviet organization of education and the arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. Cambridge University Press. 1970.[30]
  • Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1932. Cambridge University Press. 1979 1st ed.; paperback ed. 2002.
  • The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press. 1st ed. 1982; 2nd revised ed. 1994; 3rd revised ed. 2007.
    ISBN 978-0-19-923767-8
    . Translated into Braille, Czech, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
  • The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Cornell University Press. 1992.
  • Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford University Press. 1st ed. 1994; paperback ed. 1996. Translated into Russian.
  • ISBN 0-19-505001-0
    Translated into Czech, French, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
  • Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton University Press. 2005. Translated into Chinese and Russian.
  • OCLC 506020660
    .
  • A Spy in the Archives. Melbourne University Press. 2013. Translated into Turkish.
  • On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton University Press. 1st ed. 2015; paperback ed. 2017. Translated into Czech, French, German, Greek, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
  • Mischka's War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s. Melbourne University Press & I. B. Tauris. 2017.
  • White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia. La Trobe University Press. 2021.
  • The Shortest History of the Soviet Union. Old Street Publishing. 2022[31]

Articles

Book reviews

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.
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 9780815737735
.
2020 Fitzpatrick, Sheila (10 September 2020). "Whatever Made Him". London Review of Books. 42 (17): 9–11.
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.

References

  1. ^ "Fitzpatrick, Brian Charles (1905–1965)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
  2. ^ "Fitzpatrick, Sheila Mary - Woman - the Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia".
  3. ^ Reports of the President and of the Treasurer. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 1987. p. 34.
  4. ^ "Award for Scholarly Distinction Recipients". Historians.org. American Historical Association. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  5. ^ a b c d "Fitzpatrick, Sheila Mary (1941 – )". The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. University of Melbourne (The Australian Women's Register). Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  6. ^ "On Stalin's Team: the Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics". Office for the Arts, Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. 7 November 2016. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
  7. ^ a b "Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick". University of Sydney. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  8. ^ "Magarey Medal – Previous Winners". The Australian Historical Association. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
  9. ^ "2018 shortlists announced!". Office for the Arts, Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
  10. ^ Legvold, Robert (May–June 2016). "On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics". Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  11. ^ Whitewood, Peter (4 March 2017). "On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, written by Sheila Fitzpatrick". Brill. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  12. ^ "White Russians, Red Peril". Australian Catholic University. 15 April 2021. Retrieved 2 August 2021. 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.
  13. ^ Macintyre, Stuart (May 2021). "A complex mosaic: The early years of a diverse Russian-Australian community". Australian Book Review. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  14. ^ Beddie, Francesca (1 June 2021). "White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia by Sheila Fitzpatrick". Historians.org. American Historical Association. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
  15. JSTOR 2652201
    .
  16. ISBN 9780511523595
    .
  17. doi:10.2307/2496711
    . At p. 38.
  18. doi:10.1177/003232928401300201
    . At p. 13.
  19. ^
    ISBN 9789197748728
    .
  20. ISBN 978-0253203373
    .
  21. ISBN 978-0-521-72397-8
    .
  22. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . 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.
  23. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . 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.
  24. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins 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.
  25. S2CID 142829949
    .
  26. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    .
  27. ISSN 1468-2303
    . ... 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.
  28. JSTOR 130466
    . Quotes at pp. 358–359.
  29. JSTOR 130471
    . Quotes at pp. 409–410.
  30. ^ Translated into Italian and Spanish.
  31. ^ "Sheila Fitzpatrick The Shortest History of the Soviet Union". YouTube. Trinity College, Cambridge. 23 November 2022.

Further reading

  • Hessler, Julie. "Sheila Fitzpatrick: An Interpretive Essay". Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatric and Soviet Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21–36.
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor (2011). "Writing Russia: The Work of Sheila Fitzpatrick". In Alexopoulos, Golfo; Hessler, Julie; Tomoff, Kiril (eds.). Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatric and Soviet Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–20.

External links

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