Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian Russian/Soviet and twentieth-century historian, trained at the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, who worked in the US from the early 1970s, teaching at Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin and, from 1990-2012, the University of Chicago, where she was Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor and trained many graduate students in Soviet history. In 2012 she returned to Australia to take up a position at the University of Sydney.
Her early work – The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Cultural Revolution in Russia [ed.] (Blomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) – was primarily in the field of cultural policy, but with Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), she started to move into social history, which was the field of her major works on the 1930s, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Questions of social identity and class labelling were the subject of Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton University Press, 2005). In the past five years, she has published her first monograph on high politics, On Stalin’s Team: the Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017), as well as a memoir of Cold War Moscow in the late 1960s, A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne University Press, 2013). Her latest book, Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (Melbourne University Press, 2017), is about the experiences of her late husband, the physicist Michael Danos, as a “displaced person” after the Second World War.
She has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2002), ASEEES Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (2012) and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction (2012), and is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books.
Her current research project, funded by the Australian Research Council and undertaken in collaboration with Mark Edele (part 1) and Ruth Balint (part 2), is on displaced persons from the Soviet Union and Soviet attempts to repatriate them.
Other Publications:
My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood. (Melbourne University Press, 2010.)
Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Co-edited with Michael Geyer.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Stalinism: New Directions (New York: Routledge, 2000).
In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1982/3; 2nd revised ed. 1994; 3rd (revised) ed. 2007).
Interviews and Videos:
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and World History: A Centenary Reflection (Recorded in February 2017).
In this La Trobe University Ideas & Society session, Sheila Fitzpatrick, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, and Mark Edele, the Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, discuss the role that the Russian Revolution of 1917 played in shaping the history of the 20th century.
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