A Spy in the archives / Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Publication details: Carlton, Vic. : Melbourne University Publishing, 2012.Description: 346 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, facsimiles, portraits ; 20 cmISBN:- 9780522861181 (paperback)
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila
- Authors, Australian -- 20th century -- Biography
- Women -- Australia -- Biography
- Soviet Union -- Social conditions -- 1945-1991
- Spies -- Soviet Union
- Historians -- Australia -- Biography
- Spies -- Russia (Federation) -- Biography
- Soviet Union -- History
- Soviet Union -- Social conditions -- 1945-1991
- Australian
- 327.12092 23
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Biography | 327.12 FIT | Available | 057612 |
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, this book captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.