| Title | : | A Spy in the Archives |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780522861181 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 346 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2013 |
| Awards | : | National Biography Award (2014) |
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 in Cold War Russia.
A Spy in the Archives Reviews
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“Soğuk Savaş’ta Kutsal Ruh’a karşı işlenen günahın eşdeğerini işledim mi emin değilim, işledimse hangi taraf adına işlediğimden de. Ama Sovyetler Birliği’nde Kutsal Ruh olarak bilinen KGB bile kararını veremediyse, bunu ben nasıl bilebilirim.”(s.264)
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Part memoir, part Soviet history I couldn't help wondering if this book had a smaller audience than the quality of the writing deserves. Fitzpatrick plunges in with the tale of how she fell in love with the Soviet Union - not the political establishment but the place and it's people, and carries you quickly, just as you sense she was carried, into the world of Moscow and Lunacharski studies, of cld and shortages, and debates and intense intellectualism and idealism.
She captures the ideological maelstrom of Soviet politics in the 60s,pre- and post- Czechoslovakia invasion, as well as the realities of a society rife with spying of one sort or another. This world is captivating, of realists and disillusioned revolutionaries who still believe that their lives and work and choices will matter, and young people desperate to survive, maybe even get ahead, even if it means passing on information which may, or may not, have consequences.
Through this, Fitzpatrick describes a younger self who seems to drift through the dangers and personal complications, ever riveted on her studies and the contemporary and historic world of Soviet literature and critique. It is perhaps here, in the memoir space, that the book falls down a little - we see the world as young-Shiela sees it but she remains irritatingly opaque, making unconventional and often puzzling personal choices.
The book's coverage of the word of Soviet research, however, is its triumph. Belying the simplistic worlds of both anti-communists and fellow-travellers, Fitzgerald paints a multi-hued picture of a society embedded in struggle, and wanting to be so much better than it was. At the start of the book, Fitzpatrick mentions trying to get her first article withdrawn from publication - an extraordinary step really for a young academic, and you wonder what could have brought her to this. AS the book wends on, it becomes obvious - simply meeting and caring for these assionate anti-Stalinist communists and not-quite-dissidents provides a revelation about how ignorant and unhelpful a smug outsider critique is. And at the same time, it is the sheer waste of its passionate people that most ends up condemning the SU. -
Couldn't finish it
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Another book I should have reviewed immediately after having finished it! Yet, a few weeks to mull over its content and composition has left me satifised with my four star rating - Fitzpatrick's memoir's most compelling feature is perhaps its most apparent flaw (yawn, what a cliche); it's almost three or four books written into the space of a single text. A revered historian's account of their archival work, a highly personal and revealling memoir, a narrative on the absurdities of the Soviet intelligentsia and a broader commentary on the lived micro-politics of the Cold War - these framings all weaving into one another through her clear, comic and often confessional, prose.
I'd personally hoped for some more meaningful insight into her own historographic concerns, and while some vague references to future turns in her thought are scattered throughout the text, she never establishes anything too concretely about how this period came to shape her later work. Nonetheless, a highly enjoyable book, and one that's educated me further on the post-Kruschev era, of which I know little.
'He used to disconcert me by firing unanswerable questions like how much a set of spanners cost in England...' -
This is a memoir of a young Australian academic scholar who worked in Soviet archives in the 60's full stop. She wasn't a spy, there are no glamorous Mata Hari, or Fleming-like asides to be found, but the story is still fascinating and lively and gave me lots of insight into life in Moscow and the context of the Cold War
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This is a genuine account of a historian looking at her own career, and giving everybody, including herself, their dues
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If I knew anything about Soviet history or it was a slightly less academic style, I probably would have enjoyed it more. Alas.
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The book is a memoir by a noted historian of USSR and deals with her years spent researching in the Soviet archives in the 1960s. Before reading the book I didn’t even know that foreigners were allowed into the Soviet archives for research that early. Though, before the late sixties, they were mostly there for pre-1917 history. Sheila Fitzpatrick was one of those pioneers who helped begin the field of Soviet history through intensive archival work.
The memoir, while discussing the hazards of working in the archives of the USSR which included being spied on by the KGB at all times and multiple attempts at getting honey-trapped by them, also gives a very personal account of the relationships formed by the author there. Relationships which allowed the author to find a second home in Moscow after having left Australia permanently, and made her life in a strange land a bit more tolerable (she never found the same feeling of home in Britain where she did her PhD and got her first job). The detailed portraits she draws of these people living and dealing with daily life in a communist country shows the pitfalls of dividing people into simplistic Manichean categories of victims and villains, which was prevalent in scholarship of the time (and still is!). Many of these people while wanting reform in the USSR also believed in Soviet values. The memoir details the changing perception of the author as she comes into closer contacts with Soviet citizens and learns to look at their history through their eyes.
The author lays bare her feelings and complicated relationships with the people she came across in her life, ranging from her parents, husbands, lovers, adopted Russian family, friends, and so on. Her biting comments about things that displeased her make sure that the book is never dull. From the book the author emerges as a highly resourceful and organized person who bulldozed her way through multiple roadblocks (mostly travails put up by the bureaucracy) to achieve her objective, whether it was immigration or archival work. It was extremely amusing to see her descriptions of Soviet bureaucracy and material condition at work which kept on reminding me of India (my country), where I have faced such situations first hand or heard about it second hand. Just goes to show the vagaries of bureaucracy everywhere. A marvellous memoir for understanding the lived lives of people in 1960s USSR, though chiefly amongst the intelligentsia in Moscow. -
In 1966, Sheila Fitzpatrick, then an Australian graduate student who had also studied the Russian language, went to Moscow on a scholarship as part of a student exchange program between the UK and the USSR, her brief, under the supervision of Max Hayward in Oxford and Aleksandr Ovcharenko in Moscow, being to study the work of Anatoly Lunacharsky who was the Soviet Commissioner of Enlightenment during the first decade of the Soviet Union. This book is a memoir of her time in Moscow in this and a few subsequent visits to undertake this work which became her doctoral thesis.
In it, she describes her experiences with Soviet bureaucracy, attempting to access archives and certain materials within these archives, how she was able to gain some access to the Soviet and Russian archives but not the Party archives, her friendship with Lunacharsky’s daughter Irina and brother in law Igor Sats, her partial estrangement from Ovcharenko on the "you’re in our camp or their camp" basis, attempts by KGB operatives to befriend and trap her and the challenges of life in the city at that time. She also described the challenges facing the political journal "Novy Mir" which, while not exactly liberal, was always pushing against the boundaries of what could be published with challenges including censorship and restrictions on access to paper to print and distribution. She also described the use of Aesopism, making a point by telling it in a fable, which sometimes escaped the censors’ razor, the distribution of manuscripts via samizdat (clandestine publishing) networks and the taking concealed manuscripts to the West for publication.
Her title is derived from an incident in which a Soviet publication attacked her for being a spy – most foreign students and academics were assumed to be spies – although it was some time before she became aware of the article’s publication. Sheila Fitzpatrick has gone on to become a well-respected historian of the Soviet Union with several publications to her name, one of which, "Everyday Stalinism" I read recently. That book describes life for ordinary Soviet citizens under Stalin whereas this book describes the experiences of an academic with that all important foreign passport. -
This book has a very slow start, but gains momentum after page 50. Early in the book I craved more detail and description. After a certain point, it felt like Fitzpatrick had finally hit her stride, and she began to paint fuller pictures of the world around her. Still, she will never be a Henry James or even a Jane Austen when it comes to setting the scene. If you are fascinated by the plight of historical researchers, toiling long hours in the archives and working their dissertation advisors for better archive access, then this book is for you. If you’re just generally curious about what it was like to be a foreigner in Moscow during the Brezhnev era, then you might — just might — be left wanting more. I ultimately decided to give the book four stars because I was impressed by the author’s candor: she took a cold, unflinching look at younger self, her motivations and actions and was not afraid to show it to the reader in this book. That takes guts.
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An interesting, and honest description of the sixties’ Moscow by young historian working on her dissertation about Lunacharski – a first culture commissar in Soviet Russia. Full of anecdotes about her difficulties in getting access to Soviet archives, her encounters with KGB agents and their attempts to either enlist or compromise her, her interaction with locals and friendship with Igor Sats – an editor of Novy Mir.
The honest and lively style makes the reading very interesting and made me finish it in very few sittings.
Quotes:
“It was the gulf between pretensions and accomplishments in Soviet life that stuck me.
In reference to an advice to bribe an official - common at the time in Soviet life, and her Australian roots:
“Australians don’t even know how to tip, let alone bribe.” -
Sheila Fitzpatrick delves the reader into a world of an eternal struggle between East and West, full of suspicion and blind ideological devotion: the world of the Cold War. Basing her narration on memoirs of trips to the USSR in the 1960s, Fitzpatrick provides a unique account of a foreigner on life of the Soviet state after Khrushchev’s ouster. In the time of her first foreign trip to the USSR Sheila Fitzpatrick was a graduate in Oxford University, who pursued research about the Soviet People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, which encouraged her to delve into secrets of the Soviet archives.
At the first time the author faced the reality of the Cold War was at a briefing in MI6, when she and her colleges were taught how to behave in the entirely antagonistic society of the Soviet people. Fitzpatrick was prepared to argue that she was not a spy, however, she acknowledged that the ideological influence of Cold War was so total that it was difficult to understand was really working for western intelligence or not. Meditating on the question ‘Are you a spy?’, asked by a girl from Volgograd, the author admits that foreign students always provided information to spies and embassy officials without being on the payroll of any intelligence. Fitzpatrick reminds us: “In the unlikely event that I had wanted to be absolutely honest in replying to the Volgograd girl’s question, I might have said, ‘Not intentionally’”(86). The Cold War created a specific “collective paranoid obsession” thinking, which applied to virtually everything, including self-identification of the author, who was absolutely lost. The totality of Cold War thinking and inevitability to leave this paradigm shaped Fitzpatrick’s sojourn, which was not as dark as it could seem at a first glance.
Despite the fact that the author describes Moscow of the 1960s as a bureaucratized and uncomfortable living city, she presents the Soviet mundanity rather amiable. Putting plainly that “It was incredible that everyday life could be made so uncomfortable and inconvenient,” she was not above commemorating her insipid wardrobe, which, admittedly, perfectly suited the style of Moscow women. Being dressed in alike in grey clothes, Soviet women had accurate manicure and fancy hairstyles, which helped them to stand out from the crowd (64). However, the factor of knowing “proper people” affected convenience and fitfulness of her visit in a more significant way than amalgamation with the Soviet people.
Fitzpatrick developed her research through many acquaintances, which occurred during her academic examination. She made friends with the daughter of Lunacharsky and her brother-in-law. Obviously, children of ex-Commissar of the Enlightenment belonged to a privileged Soviet social stratum, so they introduced Fitzpatrick to the Soviet Union of nomenclature. The author mentioned that Irina, Lunacharsky’s daughter, lived in an 8-room apartment in Moscow, which she received using her relationships. Her brother Igor Sats was an intellectual and experienced fighter, who participated in the Revolution and the Great Patriotic War. Good relationship with this man allowed Fitzpatrick to mingle in the society of Soviet intellectuals. Particularly, she was involved in the activities of Novy Mir, the important literature journal, famous for publishing prohibited essays such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day of Ivan Denisovich. Igor Sats was a friend of Tvardovsky, the chief editor of this periodical, so that Fitzpatrick’s account on internal debates could be fairly called insider knowledge. Besides going into discussions about personal relationships between intellectuals and roles of particular authors, Fitzpatrick highlights that the magazine, which was treated as liberal and dissident, actually never claimed to overturn the Soviet system because people who participated in its activity were devoted communists. “It [Novy Mir] stood for Communism (the right kind, of course, not the kind corrupted by time-severs), and in the second place, for critical intelligence” (219). Undoubtedly, intellectuals from Novy Mir had their own understanding of communism and Lenin’s maxims, but it did not apply to the dialectics of upheaval.
This book explains the origins of Fitzgerald’s revisionism, which is probably rooted in her experience of working in the Soviet archives. Having a unique access to documents, the future famous historian had the ability to revaluate the significance of Sovietologist axioms, which tended to examine the USSR from the top-down perspective. In opposite to this conceptual framework, Fitzgerald approached Soviet history from below. Contrary to the expectations, this inference was made from the book, which cannot be called an academic one.
Seemingly, a text based on memoirs should fairly convey the atmosphere of the time because this memory is not overshadowed with later rethinking of personal experience. However, the book is replete with nostalgia, which makes reading it more interesting, but also influence on what is called “objectivity.” It is worth noting that the text does not pretend to be academic, therefore there are no major arguments or other specific features of scientific academic writing. Additionally, a reader will not find in this book a description of ordinary Soviet citizen’s life because Fitzpatrick mostly communicated with people of haut monde. Fitzpatrick’s memoir A Spy in the Archives is a well-written story about Cold War reality, which will be an enjoyable reading for everyone who is interested in history of twentieth century.
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I loved the atmosphere of this memoir, following young Sheila Fitzpatrick on her first trip to Moscow at the beginning of her academic career. Thanks to the letters she exchanged with her mother, many fleeting thoughts and impressions were preserved to give insight into her psychology. I particularly enjoyed the depiction of daily life in the Soviet Union in 1960s (from a perspective of a priviledged foreigner, of course), imagining how these experiences kindled Fitzpatrick's interest in Soviet everyday life. There were some parts I found quite lengthy and not really exciting but overall it was a nice read.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick is one of my favourite historians & this memoir is a fascinating insight into her time as an exchange student in the USSR, at the height of the Cold War. My respect & appreciation of her work has grown enormously from reading ‘A Spy in the Archives’.
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Pretty good. A little slow at times, but it was fun to read about a professor and how she started in the profession. I also learned quite a bit about Lunacharsky.
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Too slow. DNF
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Very interesting at times and also very boring at times.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick’s autobiographical account of her first two trips to the Soviet Union are as arresting as they are masterfully written. It is a rarity to witness a scholar invert the lens of their frame of reference to include critical analysis of themselves and their work as an (even temporary) installment in Soviet society. Although objectivity is out of the question, Fitzpatrick’s often unflattering memoir of a young woman adrift in the sea of Soviet ideological tensions is complex and compelling in all of the ways a Cold War spy novel should be, yet it retains the dignified scholarship which has proven to be a hallmark of Fitzpatrick’s career.
Fitzpatrick’s recreation of the Soviet Union recalls the dark uncertainty and unsettling contrariness of Nabokov’s invention Zorland.(1) Yet, in spite of this bleak comparison, the author seems to feel far more welcomed and at home in Soviet Moscow than in either her home country of Australia, or her patron country: Great Britain. By carefully avoiding activities and perspectives that would limit her to a strictly expatriate occupation in the Soviet Union, Fitzpatrick emerges as a voice of one who has been truly and thoroughly immersed in the machinations of the Soviet machine.
Moscow in the 1960s was naturally in a state of flux after Stalin’s death in 1953, however the progressive nature of the Thaw, owing its success to support by then Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Krushchev, had since been repressed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, a far more conservative party member who came to replace Krushchev’s Thaw with his own period commonly referred to as The Stagnation. It is in this political climate that Fitzpatrick finds herself in Moscow for both the first and second time in 1966.
Because of inconsistencies in the policies of the former chairmen of the party, it was a particularly difficult task to gauge the level of obliqueness necessary in scholarship and discussion regarding certain aspects of the Soviet past. The rather evasive nature of Fitzpatrick’s subject, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, presented further problems. He was a highly visible figure, insomuch as he was well-documented, in a position of great power, and a dutifully prolific writer. Yet Fitzpatrick’s scholarship of Lunacharsky sought to qualify his position in history as being a Soviet apologetic: at once defending the creations and art of Soviet artists and the intelligentsia while simultaneously administering to the demands of the Soviet censor, and worse yet, becoming the head of the Soviet censor.
Lunacharsky was a negatively charged persona non grata for years after his death, which is perhaps why he was so attractive to Fitzpatrick as a subject. He was neither a saint, nor was he the devil incarnate, as so many from Western countries considered Stalin to be. Yet the revitalization of Lunacharsky, brought about in the 1950s, created an avenue for Fitzpatrick to reconstitute and reevaluate Lunacharsky’s value as a censor, a writer, and as a Soviet apologetic. The danger of this, so vividly illustrated in the opening chapter of the book, was that of negative reception and accusations of ideological dissidence.
It is cloaked in this identity that Fitzpatrick introduces herself to her readers- a spy. A Spy in the Soviet archives, writing dissident information about a formative Soviet figure in foreign publications edited by university that was equated with the crème-de-la-crème of British espionage. This is, of course, the Soviet interpretation, however an enduring trope of this memoir is the perpetual Soviet question: “Ty/Vy Shpion/Shpionka?” To which Fitzpatrick replies: “’I don’t think so’. Or even ‘I hope not’.”(2) The implication being, of course, that quite possibly every foreign scholar was a spy. This central question permeates Fitzpatrick’s memoir and provides an excellent rubric by which to evaluate the information provided by the author and its relevance.
Unfortunately, it also provides the reader with the conundrum of whether or not he or she fully trusts Sheila Fitzpatrick as a narrator and dictator of what was truly relevant. Fitzpatrick’s agenda is at times unclear: is she writing a memoir in an attempt to be self-critical of her own scholarship and time abroad in the Soviet Union, or is this an ideological ploy to retrospectively evaluate and reconstitute the nature of Soviet Society in the 1960s? This is unclear. However what is completely inescapable is that this memoir is both a personal and academic achievement for its creator, and should be lauded as an excellent example of both an intimately personal narrative and a soul-searching self-analysis that is at times critically unflattering.
(1) Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Glory: Vladimir Nabokov. London: Penguin, 1974. Print.\
(2) Fitzpatrick, Sheila. A Spy in the Archives. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne UP, 2013. 86. Print. -
Ever since the beginning of the war in Ukraine I have developed an obsession with all things Soviet. Or rather, my dormant interest in the subject has come to light. This is a wonderful book about many things, but especially, in my ignorant opinion, about what "being in the world" meant to Soviet citizens in the 1960s - being in a polarised world, but also in a self-contained bubble where the dialectical relationships governing international relations had a different meaning. Fitzpatrick's retelling of her own quest to find her way of being in the world - academic and otherwise - is the perfect lens to uncover a bit of what that was like for ordinary Russians during the Thaw. Highly recommended.
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When Sheila Fitzpatrick started her research into the literary journalist, Bolshevik and revolutionary Lunacharsky, a man who is perhaps nowadays little known in the West but who in his time was very influential in the Soviet Union, Soviet Studies was in its infancy – or perhaps hadn’t even been born. There were very few Soviet historians around and in many ways the Soviet period wasn’t even considered a proper period of historical study. But Sheila Fitzpatrick had studied Russian in her native Australia and was to become a noted Sovietologist and Soviet historian.
In 1966 she received a scholarship from the British Council and this fascinating book covers her years working in the Soviet Union, and her adventures in gaining access to the archives she needed for her research. She became friends with the family of Lunacharsky, and especially with Igor Sats, who had been his secretary. At the time it was almost unknown for Western scholars to get permission to work in Soviet archives dating from 1917, but Fitzpatrick’s own persistence and the support of Sats and others paid off, and she received unprecedented access.
She kept a diary during her visits to the Soviet Union, and wrote many letters, especially to her mother, and these detailed contemporary accounts give this book an immediacy which is very compelling. Inevitably she was at one point accused of being a spy – the Soviets were always suspicious of foreigners - but ironically she didn’t even read the article in the Russian newspaper and in any case it had her name wrong!
Her descriptions of life and conditions in the Soviet Union are so atmospheric, and the people she meets really come alive. If you want an insight into Soviet life, this book is invaluable. Through her friendship with Sats, she was privy to the background of the pivotal publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Noviy Mir and the rise of dissident literature. Back in the UK, at Oxford, she interacted with other eminent Russian scholars and historians such as E H Carr and Max Haywood, and her reminiscences there are equally fascinating.
It is possible that this book will be of most interested to those readers who are already interested in Soviet history, but there is a lot here for the general reader also, and Fitzpatrick is to be congratulated on writing such a readable and absorbing memoir. -
Why Read: Another fantastic Net-Galley pick, I really loved that I was approved for this read. It provided not only great insight into what it meant to visit Soviet Russia, but I personally felt interested in the main characters experiences throughout the book.
Review: The Spy in the Archives was not what I believed it would be. The gritty detail that Fitzpatrick puts into her past is stunning, and the detailed read into Soviet History was one I loved getting a special inside peek on.
From a character perspective, it was hard to empathize with Sheila, the main character. Not only was she vaguely rude towards her mother and fiancé, she also put herself into situations that seemed not-so-smart. But her honesty made up for the traits, and soon her interactions with Igor and Irina began to feel like close conversations with a friend.
The plot did a strange thing in this memoir, and although I cannot precisely dislike it, it really threw me off. Instead of hinting towards the climax of the book, it came out in the first chapter and in the blurb to tell you exactly what was going to happen. I found that…. Well, firstly strange. But ultimately it didn’t lend itself exactly to prime storytelling central, but it was an interesting manner in which to tell a story.
From beginning to end, A Spy in the Archives was an exciting read. Sheila’s interactions with spies and friends alike provide an interesting insight into the environment of the Cold War within the Soviet Union. Historians will find excitement within this novel, and although it does not read as a thriller – the escalating moments of the Cold War are pressuring enough that you won’t be able to put it down. -
A bit of a spooky spy thriller, centered around the Stalin era, an innocent abroad, historian interested in the soviet politics and working on the Russian empire, the perfect person to become a spy whilst living in England and attending college there. This novel captures life and times of Russia in the cold war, soviet espionage at its best,.
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This was an interesting book to those interested in history, the Soviet Union, and the life of an academic. The prose is beautiful and the stories interesting. The book makes the life of an academic working in the archives seem almost glamorous without sugarcoating the difficulties of life in the Soviet Union and the fortitude it took to live with ambiguity, obstruction, and shortages.
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Required to read this for a graduate history seminar and having no extensive previous knowledge of the Soviet Union, Fitzpatrick was able to make her experiences there easy to understand and captivating.
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What a damn brainiac. All the nerd drama one could ever ask for. I loved this book!
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Fascinating
