An All Too Human Enemy
November 2013
From Melbourne to Oxford, Moscow to Chicago, the career of leading Soviet and Modern Russian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick comes to vivid life through the portraits of those she met and worked with. Here the focus falls on the Moscow years.
For most, at this remove, the Soviet Union of the 1960s is an entirely lost world. If it exists at all, it is under a layering of easy clichés: cosmonauts, athletes, chess players, a nuclear arms race, heroic dissidents, gulags, ongoing political repression and social deprivation. From the vantage point of fifty years the human subtleties vanish; the personal dramas of everyday life – love, ambition, jealousy, pride and selflessness – disappear below the forgetfulness built up by time and the residue of political enmity. Adding to the lack of comprehension, the current Russian regime under Vladimir Putin has hardly enamoured itself with either progressive liberals or conservatives of the west.
Into the world of Brezhnev’s Russia all those years ago came a young Melbourne woman, via Oxford University and a British Council exchange: Sheila Fitzpatrick, daughter of socialist author, journalist and political economist Brian Fitzpatrick, was in Moscow to pursue her study of the figure of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, who guided the new political system’s educational and cultural order from the Bolshevik Revolution’s first days until 1929.
Arriving in Moscow, Fitzpatrick felt at home after the rigidity of Oxford. For all its superb political and social analysis of the period, as she recounts her many adventures in following the often difficult path towards her doctoral thesis amongst the Russian archives, what comes bursting from the pages of Fitzpatrick’s brilliant new memoir, A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne University Press) is the human dimension of this lost society. The sheer warmth of the people who fill Fitzpatrick’s narrative melts away the sub-zero winds, the deep drifts of snow, the plates of ice, the humourless bureaucrats and the long faces on the shivering queues of hungry shoppers. “Russians,” says Fitzpatrick in a letter home to her mother at one point early in her time in Moscow, “even when they are sophisticated, are not self-conscious…” This was a culture and society whose people remained unconquered by the indescribable sufferings of the twentieth century’s wars and disastrous political experiments.
Fitzpatrick describes a people in love with ideas and debate, constantly challenged by the authoritarian nature of their political system but undaunted by it: “People had the ability to launch into really quite detailed and well thought-out analysis, which came out very fluently and without the embarrassment that I think an Australian would normally feel,” she says over the phone. This is part of “a very deep intellectual seriousness” declaimed without inhibition, a talking from the heart and head. “The way Russians interacted with their circle of friends – that was one of the very attractive features of the society. As soon as you gained admittance to a circle, you were part of a very open group, where people spoke freely and of things they thought were really important – which of course often we don’t.”
By her own admission incredibly shy, yet intellectually as sharp as a tack and with an increasing fluency in the Russian language, Fitzpatrick set about writing a thesis on Lunacharsky to meet her own demanding criteria, rather than those her hosts might have wished to see her follow. This brought her into contact with two of the great influences and loves of her life – the down-to-earth Igor Sats (Lunacharsky’s secretary, assistant and brother-in-law) who eschewed all comforts and privileges, and the cultured if somewhat snobbish and headstrong Irina Lunacharskaya, adopted daughter of the rehabilitated Soviet commissar (and niece of Igor Sats, whose sister was Lunacharsky’s second wife – the circumstances of their union were inevitably scandalous for a puritanical Bolshevik old guard). Igor Sats (who also claimed to have shared a Polish lover with Stalin in the 1940s, though one assumes the surly Georgian knew nothing of this double-crossing) and Lunacharskaya became beacons guiding Fitzpatrick on this Muscovite stage of her personal and intellectual development.
Touching too, though tainted by a later betrayal to the KGB, is Fitzpatrick’s portrait of her university dorm neighbour Galya, a Russian girl from Uzbekistan, whose mother was “a midwife in Samarkand who regularly sent her grapes and jam”. Though not close friends – to Fitzpatrick and others Galya was something akin to a rural hick, a complete innocent abroad in sophisticated Moscow – it is nevertheless through her that Fitzpatrick comes to understand on a personal level the vast dimensions of the grief and loss suffered by Russian families during World War II, and in particular the orphaning of an entire generation of children then growing into adulthood in the 1960s. Many of this generation, if they knew their fathers at all, knew them as damaged, alcoholic, psychologically disturbed, ‘non-functioning’ figures, ruined by the experiences of war and the complete lack of subsequent provision of care.
Exploring Moscow and its history and architecture in her spare time, there are the surreal anecdotes that closed political and social systems throw up: Fitzpatrick recounts the visit of a German citizen to Moscow in the 1930s who found there were no actual maps of the city (street names changed with the rise and fall of revolutionary heroes) but only a map showing how it would exist, according to The Plan, in 1945. Future perfect: the stuff that writers’ dreams are made of.
Even to Fitzpatrick, who lived the experiences, the era of Brezhnev and its attempts to control the information citizens received – that world of smuggled letters, books and medicines – seems incredibly distant. “Then, in the 1960s, we were closer to the Great Purges than we are now to the events of the 1960s. By the time I was there, information was coming in, in dribs and drabs, and there were samizdat circulating amongst the intelligentsia, but the old ways of disseminating information, which depended very heavily on the rumour mill as a counter to official propaganda, were still in place.”
Censorship in Russia now exerts a much greater influence on television than newspapers, where Fitzpatrick says there is a lively press. The irony of the Edward Snowden saga played out at Moscow airport is not lost on her, finding the United States, old Cold War foe, attempting to control the information flow of one of its citizens in Russian territory – albeit that information is now global, ubiquitous and instantaneous. Leaving aside the question of Russia’s own treatment of certain journalists, the panic around Snowden arose from a sense of sand slipping through fingers.
***
It’s easy nowadays to cast a knowing laugh at titles such as ‘Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment’, until realising the same function is still carried out in our own society, albeit we’re too weary, cynical and post-modern to allow that anyone – outside of organised religion – might be in charge of ‘Enlightenment’. Lunacharsky was a kind of primary gatekeeper, a curator, an editor for the nation, an arbiter of taste and content. His functions are fulfilled by our own educated class of gatekeepers – content commissioners, festival directors, gallery curators or magazine editors to name a few. “Somebody,” as Fitzpatrick explains, “who can be a kind of broker between an educated public and the people who run the government. Public intellectuals have some of these functions.” In Lunacharsky’s time, however, the concept of ‘patronage’, while developing, was not yet recognised in public discourse, coming only later when writer Maxim Gorky took over the role.
As a Soviet historian, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an astonishing moment – and not always an easy one. At this time Fitzpatrick was training a new generation of historians at the University of Chicago. “There was a tremendous change when the formerly classified archives opened. To have your field of study de-materialise is really quite something,” she laughs gently, “but the opening of the archives was tremendously exciting. It took a decade to get a real sense of what was out there,” Fitzpatrick adds, referring to the mass of information becoming accessible in the vast expanses of the provinces and smaller republics.
Igor Sats died in 1979 and Irina Lunacharskaya in the early 1990s. Fitzpatrick’s two closest friends, then, did not see the transition to modern Russia that began with the catastrophic circus of the Yeltsin years. Fitzpatrick is certain they were better off for not knowing the fate of the Soviet Union: despite all the privations of that system, on a purely personal level the end of empire was deeply humiliating for many good people, as an entire world and its certainties crumbled. For Igor Sats, critical though he was of the system, the sense that it had all been without meaning, a lifetime’s work and struggle all for nothing – he had run away at 14 to join the Bolsheviks – would have been too much to bear. And for Irina, the end of the Soviet Union greatly diminished the relevance and study of her beloved Anatoly Lunacharsky.
The writing of Russian and Soviet history is undergoing changes too. The 1990s experience of transitional crisis has in turn underwritten the strength of Putin who, Fitzpatrick says, “can’t afford to ditch the Stalin period as it was a period of Russian greatness. They were a superpower. They ‘won the Second World War’. The sense that ‘we were important in the world’ is terribly important to Russians, and therefore you can’t write Stalin out of history the way intellectuals wanted to do in immediate aftermath of the collapse”.
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s A Spy in the Archives is published by Melbourne University Press, RRP $32.99; E-Book $29.99
Images:
1) Sheila Fitzpatrick and Igor Sats, in his study, 1969
2) A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne University Press)
3) Sheila Fitzpatrick by the Moskva River, winter 1969
Photos courtesy of the author and Melbourne University Press.
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