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    A Spy in the Archives
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    A Spy in the Archives
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    A Spy in the Archives
    Ebook357 pages6 hours

    A Spy in the Archives

    By Sheila Fitzpatrick

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    About this ebook

    In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was ‘outed’ by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
    Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britain—a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor. An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home. For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy.
    Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMelbourne University Publishing Ltd
    Release dateSep 1, 2013
    ISBN9780522861198
    Unavailable
    A Spy in the Archives
    Author

    Sheila Fitzpatrick

    Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of History at the University of Chicago. She is considered to be the founder of the field of Soviet history. She regularly contributes to the London Review of Books, and is the multiaward winning author of numerous titles including Everyday Stalinism, The Russian Revolution and A Spy in the Archives.

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    • 4/5
      I read this as a continuation of "My father's daughter" and was not disappointed. There is much to admire in Fitzpatrick's gutsy determination to succeed as an historian of Soviet Russia - against political opponents, academic rivals, Soviet suspicion and bureaucracy, prejudice against female academics (in the sixties and seventies), relationship problems, etc. It is a very revealing description of the time, and sometimes surprising - but for me her seeming lack of reaction to the worst aspects of the Cold War - the Vietnam war for example - is difficult to understand.