What's the tea on Sheila Fitzpatrick? Haven't gotten around to any of her work yet
Sheila Fitzpatrick is one of the prominent historians of the "revisionist" school of the Soviet Union, which emerged as a response to the "totalitarian" or "traditionalist" school that was prominent earlier, such as Robert Conquest. Fitzpatrick's most notable contributions to history come from the perspective of the lower classes of the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union was not a singular ideological monolith driven from the top-down and that it had to respond to social forces within its own nation. In many ways, it's actually a welcome revision from the 1950's era of Soviet historiography, and the scholarship produced has increased the overall level of historical understanding.
For herself, Sheila Fitzpatrick is perhaps most notable for her "people's history" of the Soviet Union, one divorced from ideology and focused mostly on social mobility and the experiences of the peasantry and line workers. Perhaps most controversially (and what I was referencing in the earlier post), is that Fitzpatrick contends that the Great Purge and Stalinism was an albeit brutal form of democratic revolution, due to the people that were able to move into the places of those purged and experience social advancement. Stalin secured a way of public buy-in through a newly-empowered cadre of middle-class individuals to achieve legitimacy for his government and secure popular buy-in.
Now, of course, to outside observers, this is nonsense. Murdering people and distributing their stuff to other people is not a viable method of securing popular buy-in or achieving democracy. But because the purged were "class enemies," Fitzpatrick identifies them as "bourgeoise" and "executives," somehow this confers the action a form of legitimacy not seen in other historical or scholarly analysis - it was okay to exterminate them because others were able to benefit, conferring the idea that the people being purged were inherently less worthy than the people who benefitted. Similarly, Fitzpatrick, who took great pains to minimize the effect of ideology within the Soviet Union, is singularly unable to answer the question of why these targets were deemed acceptable in the first place - though ideology provides a very clear outline as to why such "class enemies" would be exterminated. Since such scholarship would be seen as antithetical to the revisionist school, however, it had to be discarded, which undermines the authenticity and accuracy of historical scholarship.
What bothers me about Fitzpatrick is that this is not considered a fringe belief of an otherwise respectable historian, but that this is considered a valid interpretation of a period of history with implications delivered further into the present. To Fitzpatrick's scholarship, it's *okay* to murder undesirables provided that they're the correct undesirables (a big problem given the rise in the justification of violence toward groups deemed to be subhuman - just look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Now, this is hardly unusual from a Marxist perspective - Orthodox Marxism depends on the categorical extermination of undesirables to achieve its desired societal utopia, but Fitzpatrick is no tankie and is in fact, quite critical of Stalin, otherwise, but has to find ways to mitigate his atrocities so he's not relegated as a monster.
This has been the case for a lot of contemporary historical scholarship with the Soviet Union. There's a significant number of false equivalencies in Soviet scholarship, such as the Great Purges or Khrushchev's forcible medication of dissidents with McCarthyism, in order to mute criticism of the Soviet Union and reject the notion of it as a censorious and ideologically-driven state. Contextually speaking, a lot of history scholars came to prominence as members of the New Left, whose anti-Vietnam War activism sought to portray the Soviet Union as a defensive, anti-imperialist, and progressive power despite all evidence to the contrary, and has similarly translated into hostility against new scholarship that brings sharper criticism of the Soviet Union into the fore. This was the case with Haynes and Klehr, whose translations of the VENONA cipher decrypts and exposure of the CPUSA's role in Soviet espionage was met with abject vituperation from the leaders of history departments - specifically and explicitly because it serves to provide evidence that undermines their core, tribal thesis. Such hostility to new scholarship, particularly that which is based in evidence instead of interpretation, is nothing short of a failure in history departments in their core mission.
Thanks for the question, Hex.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King
