Sheila Fitzpatrick

This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.* Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet Union (and the United States and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject.

Yuri Slezkine dedicates the...

When I was growing up in Australia in the late 1950s and 1960s, the displaced European intellectual turned academic was a familiar figure on university campuses. Refugees from totalitarian and wartime Europe, conversant with Marx and Weber, polyglot and multilingual (but always with strongly accented English), veterans of complicated doctrinal wars in the sectarian world of European...

‘Report any suspicious persons,’ the message flashing above the New Jersey turnpike said as I drove south towards Washington a few months after 9/11. I did not respond to the call, but it reminded me of someone who did: Pavlik Morozov, the heroic young Soviet denouncer of the early 1930s whose legend is the subject of Catriona Kelly’s new book. Unfortunately in Pavlik’s case the suspicious person he dobbed in was his own father, and angry relatives took revenge by murdering him. Pavlik won a lasting place in Soviet martyrology as the boy who was brave enough to put loyalty to the state above loyalty to family. Then, in the twilight of the Soviet regime in the 1970s and 1980s, he became the anti-hero of the Russian intelligentsia’s counter-myth, which presented him as a cowardly betrayer and a dupe. The real-life Pavlik story is, of course, more complicated; and Kelly has set herself the task of straightening it all out, which includes correcting an earlier revisionist effort, Yury Druzhnikov’s Denouncer No. 001.

If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written an interesting and provocative book about the way young Soviet Russians talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. For Yurchak, discourse is everything: there is no ‘real world’ outside the world we construct...

Ya ya ya, your father’s a Communist! The girls at my school in Melbourne in the late 1940s liked to taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought,...