Sheila Fitzpatrick: Sovietology and the New Cold War

The second of the LRB Winter Lectures for 2027; the third lecture will be given by Emily Wilson, and you can book a ticket for the whole series on the event page for the first, which will be given by Jonathan Rée.

Western Sovietology had just passed its 45th birthday when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed – an event unpredicted by Sovietologists or almost anyone else. Russia and the successor states are still dealing with the fallout, and so are Western Russia-watchers. In the days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the West’s enemy because it was communist; Putin’s Russia is not communist, but it remains the enemy. Looking back on half a century as a Soviet and Russia watcher, Sheila Fitzpatrick compares the old Cold War to the new one, and considers what the comparison means for our understanding of post-Soviet geopolitics.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia. Her books The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31 (1978), Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-34 (1979) and The Russian Revolution (1982) were foundational to the field of Soviet social history. She taught for many years at the University of Chicago, before returning to Australia, the country of her birth. She is the author of two volumes of memoir, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood and A Spy in the Archives, part of which was first published in the LRB; she is working on a memoir of 1989, to be called In from the Cold. Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War is out now.