Sheila Fitzpatrick

Biography

Sheila Fitzpatrick is member of the American Académie of arts and sciences and Australian Academy off the Humanities. It was president of American Association for Slavic and East European Studies. In 2002, it receives a reward of the Foundation Melon for its university work.

In margin of its research, Sheila Fitzpatrick occurs as a violonist in orchestras of Chamber music.

Research

Its research concentrated on the social Histoire and cultural of the period Stalinienne, particularly on the aspects of the social identity and the daily life. It currently devotes to the social and cultural changes in the Soviet Russia of the years 1950 and 1960.

In its first work, Sheila Fitzpatrick insisted on the topic of the social mobility, suggesting that opportunity for the Working class of rising socially and of constituting a new elite played a part in the legitimation of the mode lasting the Stalinist period. In spite of its brutality, the Stalinisme as a political culture would have carried out the democratic objectives of the revolution. The center of the attention always went on the victims of the purgings rather than on its recipients, the historian noted. However, consequently from the “Great Purging”, from the thousands of workmen and Communists who had access to the higher technical training schools during the first Five-year plan received promotions at stations in industry, the government and the direction of the Party.

The “Cultural revolution” of the end of the year 1920 and the purgings which shook the scientific circles, literary, artistic and the group of the executives of industry would be explained partly by a kind of “Class struggle” of the workmen against the executives and the intellectuals “middle-class”. The men who rose in years 1930 played an active role to get rid of the former leaders who blocked their own promotion. According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the “Grand Turning” found its origins in initiatives of in bottom rather than in decisions of the top. In this vision, the Stalinist policy was based on social forces and offered an answer to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the mode and the company in the years 1930.

In posterior works, the American historian gave up its vision of a “revolution by bottom” to qualify the upheavals of the years 1929-1933, not having been able to establish the proof of it. It adopted the concept of “revolution by the top”, estimating that the change was always done on the initiative of the leaders.

DEBATEs historiographic

Sheila Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of the historians “revisionists”. It is the first to have indicated the group of the Soviétologues working on Stalinism in the years 1980 like a “new troop” of historians “revisionists”.

Sheila Fitzpatrick pled for a social history which is not worried political questions, in other words which sticks rigorously to a prospect “by in bottom”. It justified it by the fact that the academics had been strongly conditioned with all to see through the prism of the State: “the social processes without relationship with the intervention of the State are practically absent from literature”. Sheila Fitzpatrick did not deny that the role of the State in the social change of the years 1930 had been enormous. It however was the only one to defend the practice of a social history “without the policy”. The majority of the young “revisionists” did not want to dissociate the social history of the USSR of the evolution of the political system.

Sheila Fitzpatrick explained in years 1980 why when the “totalitarian model” was still largely used, “it was very useful to show that the model had a party taken inherent and that it did not explain all in connection with the Soviet company. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, he is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company than it explained very well. ”

Random links: