And what happened – Weekend – Kommersant

The Alpina Non-Fiction publishing house publishes a book by the Australian Sovietologist Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Brief History of the Soviet Union, an extremely sober attempt to retell the entire Russian twentieth century in three hundred pages.

Text: Igor Gulin

Sheila Fitzpatrick is one of the oldest classics of English-language Sovietology, the author of a dozen key books for this discipline, including Everyday Stalinism, Stalin’s Command, and The Russian Revolution. Fitzpatrick has always written in plain language, but 2022’s A Brief History of the Soviet Union is a wildly popular book, with caricatures and anecdotes, references to modern popular culture (one of them, of course, is Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin) and hilarious familiarity with characters. This is one of the volumes in the British publisher Old Street Publishing’s Shortest Stories series, and it is intended not so much even for the Western, but for the English reader. This is especially noticeable in relation to materials for analogies: for example, Gorbachev’s position after Yeltsin received the presidential status is amusingly compared to Princess Diana’s family troubles. The translation of such a book into Russian at first glance looks a little strange undertaking. However, in Russia itself, by the anniversary of the founding of the USSR, it seems that not a single review book was published, and Fitzpatrick’s work perfectly fills this gap.

Fitzpatrick is really good at telling the whole history of Russia in a short, witty and intelligible way – from the eve of the revolution to the present day (the book ends with the beginning of the military operation in Ukraine – a distant effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union). Its subject is the state, which at the beginning of its existence was going to become a springboard for the revolutionary transformation of the whole world, but turned into a seventy-year experiment in building socialism in a closed (although often ajar) society. This disagreement is one of the main points of the book. In the preface, Fitzpatrick writes that the key (dialectical, Marxists would say) pair of concepts for understanding Soviet history is “in principle” and “in practice.” Politicians, theorists, officials, the most ordinary people maneuver between these two extremes: the idea of ​​​​how history should go and society should be organized, and reality always does not correspond to these settings.

This view follows logically from Fitzpatrick’s scientific biography. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Australian historian was one of the leaders in what became known as the “revisionist” trend in Sovietology. From their own hand, the previous generation, mostly Americans, was called the “totalitarian school.” The latter were convinced that the Soviet Union was ruled by people obsessed with an idea, tyrants who subordinated all social life to the fulfillment of great and bloody tasks. The revisionists argued: this is not true, ideas, of course, influence social reality, but invariably transform when they come into contact with it. People — whether they are public politicians, former peasants who have become communists, kulaks who are looking for ways to avoid repression, intellectuals who are integrating into the new order — use them for their completely personal, today’s needs. And these needs are not too different in the socialist countries from the capitalist ones: elementary survival, power, career, well-being.

Instead of the paranoia of the totalitarian school born at the beginning of the Cold War, revisionism proclaimed a healthy, rational cynicism. In that sense, he was clearly a product of the 1970s. Already in the 1990s, in polemics with the revisionists, the third wave of English-language Sovietology emerged – the so-called school of subjectivity (an opus magnum of one of its main representatives, Autobiography of Bolshevism by Yigal Khalfin, was recently published in Russian). These historians argued that ideology still matters, that through a variety of upbringing techniques, it forms not only the abstract ideals of a person, but also his way of social functioning, participation in a variety of interactions.

In The Briefest History of the Soviet Union, Fitzpatrick takes into account the findings of his younger colleagues and critics, sometimes referring to them, but at the core it is still a revisionist work. “In practice” is always different from “in principle”. The “principle” may look bright, or it may look inhuman, it may turn either side, or the other, but practice with its momentary interests will always absorb and bring it down. From the point of view of idealism, this is a failure, but from the point of view of rationality, the world of “practice” turns out to be much more acceptable for life. And among the bearers of the principle there are always hidden adherents of practice.

An example here is the characters in another book by Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Team (its abridged retelling is included in The Briefest History). The leader’s helpers, implicated in all his bloody adventures, immediately after Stalin’s death begin reforms. These reforms can be seen as a return to “Leninist norms,” but it can also be seen as a triumph of rationality that is getting out of the control of ideology, a desire to end life in the continuous state of emergency of Stalinism. Fitzpatrick is clearly a closer second look. That is why her rather scathing book is now therapeutic reading. The idea that the wildest ideological escapades are ultimately defeated by the inertia of ordinary human affairs and needs does not sound open here, but is read between the lines and is a little reassuring.

Sheila Fitzpatrick. The shortest history of the Soviet Union. M.: Alpina non-fiction, 2023. Translation: Galina Borodina

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