When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system ruled entirely from the top down. Her examination of the ministry papers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment after the Revolution, challenged this view, beginning a long career in which she has frequently questioned the conventional understanding of Soviet history and changed the field with works such as Everyday Stalinism.
In this extract from their full conversation, Sheila talks to Daniel Soar about the archival methods she used to develop her groundbreaking research on the experiences of ordinary people in Stalin’s Soviet Union and explains the problem of trying to apply a Marxist class analysis to a post-revolutionary country.
