Sheila Fitzpatrick

The story of an empire made and an empire undone - and what emerged from the ashes - by one of the world's leading authorities on Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence...

A gripping account of the paths that led postwar Russian migrants to Australia - and what they found when they arrived. More than 20,000 ethnic Russians migrated to Australia after the Second World War - yet we know very little about their experiences. Some came via China, others from refugee camps in Europe. Many of the refugees who came from...

The personal and the political collide in this masterful account of the death of a dictator. When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, he had been the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union for over twenty years, having presided over the ruthless modernisation of the early 1930s, the Great Purges later in the decade, the near-catastrophe and ultimate victory of World...

A vivid history of how Cold War politics helped solve one of the twentieth century's biggest refugee crises. When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These 'displaced persons,' or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and...

On Stalin's Team overturns the common view that Joseph Stalin's officials were merely yes-men, revealing instead that behind Stalin was a group of a dozen or so loyal and competent men who formed a remarkably effective team. This team was active from the late 1920s until Stalin's death in 1953, when they accomplished a brilliant transition as a reforming 'collective...

In 1968, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was outed by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in Soviet archives for her doctoral thesis on A. V. Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Despite KGB attention and the impossibility of finding a...