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  ‘for’ or ‘against’: are you writing a pro-Stalin book or an anti-Stalin one?

  Undoubtedly, my private feelings about Stalin are more anti than pro, but

  it goes against all my instincts to take either of those two positions. There

  are people who think that if you are writing about one of the twentieth

  century’s great ‘evil-doers’, showing up the depth and breadth of his evil

  is the sum of what you should do. That is a great task for a prosecutor

  but not, to my mind for a historian – or at least not for me as a historian.

  I want to understand the people I write about, how their minds work,

  why they think they do the things that they do, what they see as their

  28 Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team.

  29 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.

  30 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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  options. That is not what a prosecutor does, or, for that matter, a counsel

  for the defence. So I cannot make either of the basic Cold War positions

  my starting point.

  Leon Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher wrote their Stalin biographies from

  Trotsky’s standpoint, that of a political opponent defeated by someone

  he saw as a mediocrity.31 The Russian Dmitri Volkogonov, formed in

  Soviet times as a military historian with a deep respect for Stalin, wrote

  his biography in the spirit of disillusionment generated by the collapse

  of the Soviet Union and discrediting of its value system.32 The Russian

  writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (in his novel First Circle) and the American

  political scientist Robert Tucker in his Stalin biography were both trying

  to understand the man who had made them personally suffer – in

  Solzhenitsyn’s case by sending him to Gulag, in Tucker’s by preventing

  him from marrying his Russian fiancée at the end of the 1940s.33 But,

  unlike some of my other books, Stalin’s Team has no personal subtext

  – unless I deceive myself, which of course is always possible. Stalin and

  I do not have a personal connection. Even my conceit of being a spy in

  his Kremlin does not extend to a fantasy of personal contact. If I try, in

  imagination, to put us in the same time and space, all that happens is that

  I melt away as fast as I can before he notices me, which is what I used

  to do back in the old days in the Soviet Union if there was a KGB man

  around. If they do not know you, my thinking was, you are in less danger

  of being pulled into one of their tricky schemes.

  Still, that does not get me off the hook about having if not a point of

  view in the metaphorical sense, at least a vantage point for observation

  of Stalin. Am I defying Thomas Nagel and trying to capture a view from

  nowhere? I was afraid I might be, with Stalin’s Team, but after a while

  I decided I was off the hook. I have chosen an angle of vision in the book.

  It is from within the team – setting up my easel among his close associates,

  mixing with them all at the office and the dacha. I found this a very

  interesting perspective, and quite different from any of the usual ones. It is

  31 Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, trans. Charles Malamuth (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941); Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).

  32 Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, trans. Harold Shukman (London: Weidenfeld

  & Nicolson, 1991; first published in Russian in 1989).

  33 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: Norton, 1973); Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolutionary from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990).

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  not Stalin’s own point of view on himself, because the team, viewing him

  with a mixture of fear and admiration, could never fully rid themselves

  of the sense that they were his potential victims. But it is not the familiar

  victims’ point of view either, because the members of the team, along

  with Stalin, were big-time perpetrators, more or less convinced that the

  various types of repression they executed were justified and necessary,

  even if, being less bold than Stalin, they might not have thought them

  up themselves. The team has double vision, as perpetrators and victims

  simultaneously, which makes a nice vantage point for the historian.

  For all that, I have to admit that Stalin has left his mark on me, as perhaps

  the subjects of portraits often do on their painters. In the past, when

  I analysed political processes (not my main activity, but it occasionally

  happened), I tended to do so very much in my father’s voice – not

  necessarily his opinions but his tone, which was the slightly ironic one

  of someone who loves the political game but is only in a marginal way

  a player, with no party loyalties. My father was my real-life reference point

  for political process, and he revelled in the political fight (nothing pleased

  him more than being heckled at public meetings and prevailing over the

  heckler), but bore little malice towards his opponents and, in any case,

  was rarely in a position to take revenge on them. Not so Stalin, though

  he, too, loved the political fight, and missed it once he had effectively

  closed down all possibilities of open opposition. Stalin was an arch-

  Machiavellian, a pastmaster at intrigue who was also ruthless (a quality

  completely alien to my father who, like me, tended to see the pathos of

  things). Stalin could, at times, view his own activities with detachment,

  even amusement, but he also had a naturally suspicious nature and

  a serious interest in vengeance. He almost invariably attributed the basest

  motives to those around him, especially his opponents.

  It was just recently, three or four months after finishing the book, that

  I noticed something that might be called Stalin’s revenge on me, namely

  that I had begun to analyse political situations in Stalin’s super-tough-

  minded way, like a chess-player with a relentless interest in maximising

  outcomes and no concern about casualties. Fortunately, this remained

  a private and abstract activity. Occasionally, however, it has proved useful.

  The case came up recently of a displaced person from the Soviet Union

  with a shady past who reached Australia after the war and immediately,

  bafflingly, retracted his earlier statements that he had not fought for the

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  Soviet Army or been a Communist Party member.34 Channelling my

  father, I had no idea why he did this, unless it was an unlikely attack of

  conscience, but channelling Stalin (as I involuntarily did), I knew exactly

  what the man was after: as an ex-Soviet citizen used to dealing with

  security agencies and looking for a protector in his new environment, he

  was putting up his hand to attract the attention of the Australian Security

  Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) so that he could be taken under the
ir

  protection as an expert informant on communism. The only problem was

  that ASIO did not understand the signal, so he was deported.

  This story comes out of my current historical project (jointly undertaken

  with Mark Edele) on displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World

  War. Apart from the matter of occasional prompts from Stalin’s ghosts,

  this has no evident personal or memoir dimension, being absolutely

  straightforward transnational social history. The project, funded by the

  Australian Research Council (ARC), charts the experiences of refugees

  displaced from the Soviet Union during or at the end of the war, with

  particular attention to the redefinition of ‘displaced persons’ as victims

  of communism rather than victims of war and fascism (the Allies’ and

  international organisations’ initial conception), the importance for success

  as a DP of clearly articulated anti-communism (in gaining selection

  by a host country for resettlement), and the impact on the burgeoning

  Cold War discourse on communism of their arrival in the late 1940s and

  early 1950s.35 This was the largest lot of non-British immigrants of alien

  cultural heritage and irretrievably foreign languages Australia had ever

  absorbed. The study is based on multiarchival, multilingual research. The

  questions and approach are those of a social historian, in this case with

  a sociopolitical slant from the Cold War material. I am nowhere in this

  picture, not even as a spy in someone’s camp (as with the Stalin book),

  no axe to grind, no roots aspect (no ancestors from this group, or indeed

  anything but boring Anglo-Celtic stock).

  But wait: is it really so straightforward? Actually, I do have an interest,

  although it is a hidden one. My late husband, the physicist Michael

  (Misha) Danos, was a DP from Riga (which had recently and unwillingly

  been incorporated into the Soviet Union, along with the rest of the

  34 The case is in Ruth Balint’s unpublished paper, ‘Story-telling in Occupied Europe: Displaced Persons and the International Refugee Organisation, 1947–1952’, and the discussion occurred at a conference on ‘The Holocaust and the Soviet Union’, organised by John Goldlust in Melbourne on 27–28 May 2015.

  35 Edele and I are the editors of a special issue of History Australia on this topic: 12:2 (2015).

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  Baltic region) in Germany after the Second World War. He did not come

  to Australia, like the cohort I am studying, but one of his closest friends

  (one of my interviewees) did, and lived there the rest of his life, irritating

  me on my occasional visits with Misha in the 1990s by purporting to

  be an expert on all things Australian, and vehement critic of all things

  pertaining to the Australian left. I did not acknowledge his expertise,

  even though I had lived abroad for most of the half century he had lived

  here, and resented being told what to think about my own country by a

  foreigner who spoke with an accent (a truly Australian attitude surfacing).

  I also resented his criticisms of my father as a quintessential Australian

  leftist deluded about the communist world outside, and particularly his

  demand that I endorse these criticisms, by way of what the Soviets used

  to call self-criticism on my own and my father’s behalf. Regardless of

  whether or not I agreed with them (which up to a point I did), I was not

  about to admit it to him: it was a question of loyalty.

  You may say I set aside the demands of loyalty when I wrote the ‘warts

  and all’ memoir, My Father’s Daughter. Yes, but only up to a point. I was

  prepared to put in the warts in my own terms, in order to convey the man

  in all his complexity and contradictions, but I probably would not have

  written, or at least published, the book if, in the end, I had not reached

  a kind of reconciliation with my father that enabled me to celebrate him.

  But, of course, it was a worry for me: there is a long discussion in the

  book of loyalty and whether the particular notions of loyalty my father

  instilled in me justified my approach.36 The same went for my mother,

  against whom I had quite strong grievances from the past: I managed to

  work my way through them well enough to make several reviewers of the

  book more sympathetic to her than they thought I was, which I count

  as a success.

  I had already discovered with My Father’s Daughter that when you write

  memoirs, you can make the dead alive for readers who did not know

  them, as well as those who did. That was an important discovery for

  me; I remember the keen sense of having acquired a new power, to raise

  people from the dead. The concept came from the carol ‘The Seven Joys

  of Mary’,37 and I recognise a certain hubris in appropriating it. But it

  was with that in mind that I took the first step towards writing A Spy in

  36 Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter, 85–6, 253.

  37 ‘The very next blessing that Mary had / It was the blessing of five / To think her little Jesus /

  Could make the dead alive.’

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  the Archives, which was to write another ‘Diary’ piece on my late Soviet

  friend Igor Sats for the London Review of Books.38 Just as they were going

  to press, one of the editors emailed that he was fascinated by Igor, and did

  I not have a photo from the 1960s I could scan so that he could see what

  he looked like. They published that photo, which the London Review of

  Books rarely does, and I was tremendously pleased: another of the people

  I loved raised from the dead. So if I could do this for my father and Igor,

  how much more reason to do it for Misha, I thought. Moreover, I knew,

  as a historian, that I had the raw material for a wonderful book on his life

  as a DP in the box of family correspondence, diaries and photographs left

  to me when he died.

  That book on Misha as a DP was a parallel project to the ARC-funded

  scholarly study of DPs who came to Australia.39 It was a labour of love,

  involving hard practical work deciphering handwriting in German (and

  whatever other language he and his polyglot mother felt like writing to

  each other in), which was something new for me. German was Misha’s

  best language, but not mine. When I wrote my two memoirs, I hoped that

  readers would appreciate my father and Igor (as well as my mother and

  Muscovite Irina, who are also major characters), and I think that in general

  they did. I would have been disconcerted to provoke a strongly negative

  reaction to any of them. As for my self-portrayal, I did not set out to

  make myself unlikeable, but I did not feel outraged when a few reviewers

  thought I was: I felt they had a right, and that it was not incompatible

  with my purposes. I had meant to give the readers the information to

  form their own judgement.

  But the Misha book was another story. If I wrote about him, I wanted

  readers to like him. I may even have wanted them to love him, or at

  least to see why I did. That presented me with the subjectivity/objectivity

  problem in the sharpest form. On the face of it, the objectivity problem

  might seem less, in that I was not a participant i
n the events I describe

  in the book, since I did not even meet Misha until 40 years later. In fact,

  however, it was more acute because I felt the demands of loyalty more

  strongly. I am not sure that, in writing this book, I would have been

  prepared to go wherever my data took me, if it seemed to diminish Misha.

  I certainly would not have been prepared to change my opinion of my

  subject in the process of writing.

  38 Fitzpatrick, ‘A Spy in the Archives’, London Review of Books, 2 December 2010, 3–8.

  39 Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017).

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  Mischka’s War, the title of the book, in itself is a demonstration of the

  fine line I am walking. Mischka is not what I called my husband; to me,

  he was Misha. But to his family, even in my time, he was either Mike or

  Mischka, the last being what he was usually called in Germany after the

  war. There is a whole saga to be written about his names (Misha, Mikelis,

  and other variants) and which was the ‘real’ one; a question he would

  never answer. He introduced himself to me (in America) as Mike, then

  he told me he was often called Mischka, and I then renamed him Misha,

  which turned out to be what his family called him in his childhood in

  Riga. Using ‘Mischka’ in the title is a way of distancing myself. But at

  the same time, I decided, after some internal argument, to use the more

  personal of the two introductions to the book, which I drafted some

  years ago, and to allow myself to enter the story as the researcher (whose

  relationship to the subject is, of course, known) in quest of information

  and answers to questions.40

  Writing about the life of someone close to you raises all sorts of difficult

  questions. I will finish this essay by drawing attention to one of them:

  whether it is legitimate to use your subject as case study when making

  a broader historical argument or scholarly intervention. I did something

  like this once, about my father, when I wrote an (archive-based!) article on

  what he knew and could know of the world outside Australia in that era (the

  1930s to 1950s) when Australia really was cut off and access to information,

  apart from that obtained firsthand by travel, was seriously constrained.41