In the Soviet Archives: Sheila Fitzpatrick on the totalitarian hypothesis and 'everyday Stalinism'

Video Description

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. Listen to the full episode here: https://lrb.me/fitzpatrickpodyt Subscribe to the LRB: Get 12 issues for £12 https://lrb.me/youtube ABOUT THE LRB The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance. As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.