Clio's Lives Read online

  on to her, making two mistaken witnesses – but that does not mean the

  singing of the song and the emotions associated with it did not happen.

  12 For more on this, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Can You Write a History of Yourself? Thoughts of a Historian Turned Memoirist’, Griffith Review, 33 (2011), 1–7. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Getting Personal: On Subjectivity in Historical Practice’, in Alf Lüdtke and Sebastian Jobs, eds, Unsettling History (Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2010), 85–99.

  13 See My Father’s Daughter, 112 .

  14 See My Father’s Daughter, 188–9 .

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  2 . WRITING HISToRY/WRITING ABouT YouRSELF

  As a memoirist, in distinction to a historian, you are pledged to tell the

  emotional truth rather than the strictly factual one, a subjective rather

  than an objective truth.

  When I started that first memoir, I envisaged it as a detached work written

  with a light touch – a good likeness of my father, warts and all, catching

  the essence of his quirky personality. It was not my plan to go deep in

  self-revelation; I initially saw myself as outside the painting, like the

  portraitist, or at least with my own individuality muted and camouflaged.

  It did not work out that way. I had not gone far before I realised that

  you do not make a portrait of your father without stirring up all sorts of

  emotions – love, pity, disappointment, resentment, regret – and without

  offering an involuntary self-portrait as well. The way I structured the

  memoir was a progression from the father as the small child’s hero to the

  teenager’s discovery that the hero had feet of clay. You would hope that

  after adolescence came some kind of reconciliation or happy medium,

  but, in my case, my father died suddenly with us unreconciled. So that

  had to be part of the story; the light, detached touch would not work.

  Writing this part of the book made me cry, and I realised with a certain

  alarm that I wanted to make the reader cry, too.

  That is an aim that I would never have admitted as a historian.

  If I examine my work, however, especially the social history, I see that

  often I was indeed trying to move my readers, even to make them cry,

  but that I generally did this in a voice other than my own, via quotation.

  In another age, historians were bolder. The key quotation I used to convey

  my sense of the pathos of revolution in my first (dissertation-based) book,

  The Commissariat of Enlightenment, was from Thomas Carlyle’s French

  Revolution, describing Robespierre going to his execution wearing the

  sky-blue coat he had had made for the Festival of the Supreme Being:

  ‘O Reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that?’ is how Carlyle

  ends.15 I do not think I could have got away with writing something like

  that in my own voice in an Oxford DPhil thesis in 1969.

  My father, Brian Fitzpatrick, was a Carlyle man at heart; as a teenager,

  I came to dread his purple passages, usually written when drunk. He is

  known as a radical economic historian specialising in British imperialism

  in Australia and the Australian labour movement, but if you look at

  15 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (2 vols; London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1955; first published 1837), vol. 2, 359.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  his later work – The Australian People 16 and, particularly, The Australian

  Commonwealth 17 – you can see that he was way ahead of his time in

  introducing not just his civil liberties/human rights concerns but also

  putting himself into his history. Before he wrote his histories, however, he

  wrote an autobiographical novel, The Colonials.18 It includes lots of great

  social history about the home front in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee

  Ponds during the First World War, but the key thing in it is the portrait

  of his father, written ostensibly from the standpoint of an omniscient

  narrator but actually from that of the 14-year-old son, the stand-in for

  the author’s younger self. The son is infuriated by his father, critical of

  him, but he also feels a great, almost crippling, pity for him and his

  disappointments. The literary progenitor for that particular emotional

  combination is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), a favourite novel

  of my father’s.19 As a 14-year-old, I shared his liking for it, which pleased

  him. Probably his identification with the son was so great that it did not

  strike him that I might see not only the son but also the father in him.

  My father’s intrusion of the personal in The Australian Commonwealth

  was a source of embarrassment to me as an adolescent, when it came

  out; now I tend to see that element as a virtue. But I myself have been

  fairly scrupulous in separating my personal writing from the historical.

  In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and its archives opened,

  I did a lot of interesting archival work on questions of social and cultural

  history of the 1960s, but when it came to writing it up as academic

  history there were problems. I had a strong irrational feeling that once

  we got to the moment of my arrival in the Soviet Union – ‘when I came

  in’, in the autumn of 1966 – it stopped being history, and therefore could

  only be written (by me) as memoir. But at that point I was not interested

  in writing memoirs. ‘Bring in the subjective element,’ colleagues and

  publishers said, ‘it’s OK now, it’s even fashionable’. I did not want to do

  it. Apart from perhaps reminding me of my youthful embarrassment at

  The Australian Commonwealth, it apparently violated my personal sense of

  genre. If I am in it, it is got to be a memoir. The sole exception to this is

  a curious little piece I wrote on the absoluteness of truth, once you were

  16 Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People, 1788–1945 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1946).

  17 Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian Commonwealth: A Picture of the Community, 1901–1955

  (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1956) .

  18 Brian Fitzpatrick, The Colonials, with introduction by David Fitzpatrick (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2013).

  19 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (London: Heinemann, 1907).

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  looking from the old Soviet Union, based on my interactions with the

  ‘truth-telling’ journal of the 1960s, Novy mir – territory I returned to later

  in my Spy in the Archives memoir.20

  My dislike of putting myself in, however, did not mean that my scholarly

  historical books had no personal subtext. It is not true of all my books, but

  it is true of some, and I gather from my fellow historian Jonathan Steinberg

  that this is not unusual.21 It does not necessarily imply a prejudgement of

  the meaning of the events, so much as a kind of emotional disposition with

  regard to them. These particular topics of historical enquiry connected in

  some way to personal concerns of mine, and that was part of the reason

  I was interested in them. In The Commissariat of Enlightenment, for

  example, the subtext was whether it was morally acceptable for intellectuals

  to work with power, which meant making compromises but also getting

  things done (as the Commissar, Lunacharsky, did in
the Soviet Union), or

  rather to maintain the stance of perpetual opposition and, by implication,

  moral superiority favoured in the Soviet Union by many members of the

  intelligentsia and, in Australia, by my father.

  By the time I was born, my father had put away his autobiographical novel

  and his original family along with it; apart from one brother, he seemed

  to have ditched Moonee Ponds, claiming – to my shock as a child – that

  he could not remember all his sisters’ names. I did not see how anyone

  could forget something like that, and I still cannot. In the novel, he treats

  the sisters with sympathy, but he compacts the five of them into two.

  That seems to me almost as incomprehensible as forgetting their names.

  This reaction suggests that autobiographical fiction is not a possible genre

  for me. However tenuous the notion of a fact may be, I am apparently

  hardwired with the idea you have to stick with them. For me, the fun of

  telling the story, whether history or memoir, is partly finding a story that

  make sense within the constraints of the known ‘facts’, which so often and

  annoyingly get in the way of our best interpretations.

  20 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘A Short History of Truth and Lies in the Soviet Union from Stalin to Khrushchev’, in Belinda Davies, Thomas Lindenberger and Michael Wildt, eds, Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn. Historische-Antropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2008), 91–104.

  See also Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives (subtitle for British edition A Memoir of Cold War Russia) (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013; London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 220, 245–6.

  21 When he was at Cambridge, Steinberg (now at the University of Pennsylvania) ran a seminar in which historians were invited to talk about the personal subtext of well-known works – and many knew exactly what was meant, and were willing to reveal it. Personal communication from Steinberg.

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  Having written one memoir that veered off into autobiography, I sat

  down to write another, A Spy in the Archives;22 telling myself that this

  time it would stay as a memoir, with a light, detached tone, and also with

  lots of local colour. The subject was Moscow in the late 1960s. This was

  a subject that I apparently could not write about as a historian, but which

  had provided me with the subtext of at least one book, Everyday Stalinism,

  which, although its subject was the 1930s, was in conception strongly

  informed by my firsthand astonishment in the late 1960s at the manifold

  discomforts and inconveniences of everyday post-Stalinism.23 This time

  I had more fully shed my historian persona than with My Father’s Daughter

  (no bibliography or list of sources here). There is one chapter in A Spy in

  the Archives – the Novy mir one – that could be read more or less as it

  stands as cultural history (or at least the kind of cultural history, common

  in scholarship on the Soviet Union, that also has an element of personal

  testimony).24 Otherwise, I have attempted to recreate the times only from

  the very specific point of view of a resident foreigner. In the Soviet Union,

  the marking and special status of foreigners was extraordinarily strong,

  meaning that it was difficult, even in regard to people one knew intimately,

  to be sure how the world looked to them when you, the foreigner, were

  not present to skew the data.

  In the event, A Spy in the Archives did not veer as much into autobiography

  as My Father’s Daughter, but it veered a bit. For one thing, Igor Sats,

  my Soviet adoptive father, became a central character; it became a book

  bringing Igor back to life. Igor was an old spy, as he liked to boast –

  meaning a field reconnaissance person in the Second World War, not

  a KGB man – and the KGB gave both of us a certain amount of trouble

  about our friendship. But that is not the main reason A Spy in the Archives

  has that title. In the Cold War 1960s, the Soviets thought all foreigners

  who did research on their history, politics, society and culture were likely

  to be spies; among historians, the most suspect were the very small group,

  including me, working on post-1917 topics. I, in addition, came directly

  22 Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives.

  23 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). If I moved my 1960s observations back into the past, several novelists have used this book as a basis for their fictions about the 1950s – they include Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), who acknowledges the debt on p. 363 – or, in even more recent times, Tom Rob Smith, author of Child 44 (London: Simon

  & Schuster, 2015), as stated in interview with Kate Evans on ‘Books & The Arts’, Radio National, 16 March 2015.

  24 Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives, ch. 6.

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  from St Antony’s in Oxford, which was constantly attacked in the Soviet

  press as a ‘spy college’; its fellows, including my DPhil supervisor, did in

  fact have close connections with British intelligence. We – the 20 British

  exchange postgraduate students in Moscow in my year – were all obsessed

  by spying (it was the age of Philby and the Cambridge Four);25 however,

  given my topic and my St Antony’s affiliation, I was probably more worried

  than most about being ‘unmasked’ as a spy and expelled. They did unmask

  me in the end, as I relate in the book,26 but fortunately did not realise

  that the author of the article they regarded as the ‘next thing to spying’

  was me, actually in the Soviet Union at the time, because the article was

  written under my maiden name with initials and they thought the author

  was a man. But apart from the adventure aspect, this spy business left

  a mark on me. From the Soviet point of view, any foreigner who burrowed

  away trying to find out their secrets (as I was doing in their archives),

  was ‘objectively’ – that is, in the overall scheme of things – a capitalist

  spy, regardless of whether they were on any intelligence service’s payroll.

  I knew I was not on anyone’s payroll and I did not feel like a capitalist.

  But I am not sure that under interrogation I could have denied with any

  conviction that I was essentially a spy.

  Stalin would have had no doubts about the matter. All historians who

  put data above ideology were ‘archive rats’ and, if they were foreign,

  they were spies, it was absolutely clear. Stalin and his team was my next

  project, a historical one again, archive-based though written for a popular

  audience. I approached it with my normal sense of detachment (which

  can also be read as a God’s-eye view implying moral superiority)27 and

  a specific determination to avoid pushing any political agenda (not that

  I was conscious of having one). But I did bring one personal conceit to

  the work, undoubtedly inspired by my Moscow memoir and the Moscow

  memories they had revived. This was to imagine myself as a spy in Stalin’s

  camp, using the intelligence tactic he most feared – planting a spy among

  his closest associates to get the inside story.

  25 The two defectors of the early 1950s, diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess; Kim Philby, who defected in 1963;
and the art historian Anthony Blunt.

  26 Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives, 281–2.

  27 When I read Sarkar’s (approving) reference to ‘the passionless voice of superiority’ of the impartial historian in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 96, doi.org/10.7208/

  chicago/9780226240244.001.0001, I had an uncomfortable sense of hearing myself when young.

  Admittedly Sarkar glossed this as superiority to the biases of temporal and spatial location.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  My book, On Stalin’s Team, is not a Stalin biography, but rather a collective

  biography of Stalin and his team – the dozen or so men who over a period

  of 30 years were closest to him (Molotov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Beria

  among them).28 It is not conventional political history, more like an

  ethnography of a ruling group, focusing on strategies for coping, surviving

  and advancing in the world of what Montefiore called Stalin’s ‘court’. The

  team’s wives and children are in there too, and I use memoirs quite heavily

  as well as political archives. I am essentially applying to the top political

  elite the techniques I used to describe the everyday practices of ordinary

  people in my earlier social history books.29 This is the first big historical

  work I had written since finishing the Spy in the Archives memoir in 2013.

  The question as I started writing was whether, and how, the experience

  of writing memoirs was going to change things. I read around in the

  theoretical literature on objectivity, and the point that impressed me

  most was Thomas Nagel’s:30 to the extent that objectivity is a ‘view from

  nowhere’, it is a contradiction in terms. If one thinks in terms of portrait

  painting, the painter might think she was approaching her subject with an

  open mind (without a ‘point of view’), but he was undoubtedly proposing

  to paint him not only at a particular point in space and time but from one .

  In other words, he was somewhere in physical relation to his subject as he

  painted, not nowhere. That brings me back to Stalin. If my view of Stalin

  cannot be from nowhere, where is it from?

  I puzzled about that for a long time. The way the point-of-view

  question was always posed in Soviet history during the Cold War was