Here is a pioneeering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russain history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930's, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivisation and the first Five Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. with the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivised villages, major cities were soon in the grip of a major housing crisis, with families jammed for decades into tiny single rooms in communal appartments, counting living space in square metres. It was a world of overcrowding, privation, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promise of future socialist abundance rand hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and of the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it, primarily by patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as "blat". And we read of the police surveillance that was endemic to this society, and the waves of terror like the Great Purges of 1937, that periodically cast this world into turmoil. Fitzpatrick illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shoppping, travelling, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising a family, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and trying to steer clear of the secret police. Based on extensive research in the Soviet archives only recently opened to historians, this superb book illuminates the ways ordinary people tried to live normal lives under extraordinary circumstances.

What makes Tear off the Masks! so appealing and why the pieces work so well together is that they cover a broad range of experiences associated with what it meant to be a Soviet citizen. Certainly, it will be a boon to the field to have the book available for courses. Tear off the Masks! is so appealingly written, full of wit and occasional humor, that it could serve as a model of the historian's craft. What we get is a phenomenal, nearly unparalleled depth of research combined with a transparency about research methods that invites the reader into this particular(ly skilled) historian's laboratory.

This provocative and eminently readable work looks at the many upheavals of the Russian Revolution as successive stages in a single process. Focusing on the Russian Revolution in its widest sense, Fitzpatrick covers not only the events of 1917 and what preceded them, but the nature of the
social transformation brought about by the Bolsheviks after they took power. Making use of a huge amount of previously secret information in Soviet archives and unpublished memoirs, this detailed chronology recounts each monumental event from the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the
Civil War of 1918-1920, through the New Economic Policy of 1921 and the 1929 First Five-Year Plan, to Stalin's "revolution from above" at the end of the 1920s and the Great Purge of the late 1930s.
Lucid and concise, this classic study makes comprehensible the complex events of the revolution.

The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the twentieth century. Now, following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it is possible to step back and see the full picture of this event for the first time. This volume tells the gripping story of a Marxist revolution that was intended to transform the world, but instead visited enormous suffering on the Russian people, and, like the French Revolution before it, ended up devouring its own children. The author offers insightful descriptions of the February and October Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, the interlude of NEP, Stalin's "revolution from above," the various Five Year Plans, and the Great Purges, all treated as discrete episodes in a twenty year process of revolution. The book incorporates data from archives that were previously inaccessible not only to Western but also to Soviet historians, as well as drawing on important recent Russian publications such as the memoirs of one of the great survivors of Soviet politics, Vyacheslav Molotov. In the bibliography, the author, an internationally known expert on Soviet history, highlights the most important of the recent scholarly works, directing readers to the burgeoning Western scholarship on the Russian Revolution in the last ten to fifteen years. This third edition uses newly available Soviet archival material and the latest Russian and Western research to provide an authoritative, compact account of one of the key events of modern history.

A personal memoir by the daughter of journalist and radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick, this meditation reveals a complex portrait of an Australian family against a Cold War backdrop. Told with piercing insight, this recollection chronicles Sheila's relationship with her father as it fades from girlhood adoration to adolescent skepticism, resulting in her fleeing Melbourne for Oxford to start a new life. Candid and moving, this narrative is a vivid evocation of an Australian childhood and a mature realization that one cannot fully escape one's roots.

Drawing on newly-opened Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint and petition with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, Stalin's Peasants analyses peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village. Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between transformationally-minded Communists and traditionally-minded peasants over the terms of collectivization: a struggle of opposing practices, not a struggle in which either side clearly articulated its position. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village, exploring questions of authority and leadership, feuds, denunciations, rumors, and changes in religious observance. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the "Potemkin village" created by Soviet propagandists. In the Potemkin village, happy peasants clustered around a kolkhoz (collective farm) tractor, praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the real Russian village of the 1930s, as we learn from Soviet political police reports, sullen and hungry peasants described collectivization as a "second serfdom," cursed all Communists, and blamed Stalin personally for their plight. Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in studies of the Stalinist period--a richly-documented social history told from the traumatic experiences of the long-suffering underclass of peasants. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia.

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 Europe preferred to keep a low profile in Australia, and some tried to ‘pass’ as Polish, West Ukrainian or Yugoslavian. They had good reason to do so: to the Soviet Union, Australia’s resettling of Russians amounted to the theft of its citizens, and undercover agents were deployed to persuade them to repatriate. Australia regarded the newcomers with wary suspicion, even as it sought to build its population by opening its doors to immigrants.
Making use of newly discovered Russian-language archives and drawing on a lifetime’s study of Soviet history and politics, acclaimed author Sheila Fitzpatrick examines the early years of a diverse Russian-Australian community and how Australian and Soviet intelligence agencies attempted to track and influence them. While anti-communist ‘White’ Russians dreamed a war of liberation would overthrow the Soviet regime, a dissident minority admired its achievements and thought of returning home. This is immigration history at its vivid, grounded best.

The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the twentieth century. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it has become possible to step back and see the full picture. This fully updated new edition of Sheila Fitzpatrick's classic short history of the Russian Revolution takes into account the new archival and other evidence that has come to light since then, incorporating material that was previously inaccessible not only to Western but also to Soviet historians Starting with an overview of the roots of the revolution, Fitzpatrick takes the story from 1917, through Stalin's 'revolution from above', to the great purges of the 1930s. She tells a gripping story of a Marxist revolution that was intended to transform the world, visited enormous suffering on the Russian people, and, like the French Revolution before it, ended up by devouring its own children.

This book explores Soviet prosecution records to tell the hidden story of ordinary citizens who were arrested for expressing discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years.

Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu—one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

This is a history of Soviet education policy 1921-34 that places special emphasis upon the theme of social mobility through education. One of the hitherto untold stories of Soviet history is the making of the 'Brezhnev generation', a cohort of young workers and Communists sent to higher education during the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) and subsequently catapulted into leadership positions in the wake of the Great Purge of 1937/38. A focal point of this book is the educational policies which not only produced the 'Brezhnev generation', but also linked Stalin's regime with the massive upward mobility of the industrializing 1930s. The book is the first comprehensive history of Soviet education in the 1920s and early 1930s, and provides a sequel to the author's highly praised Commissariat of Enlightenment. In this, as in the earlier study, the author has used Soviet archival sources not previously available to Western scholars.

／／／蘇聯誕生100年／／／
一窺蘇聯帝國建立和毀滅的故事，
及其灰燼中出現的新勢力。
※1980年代布里茲涅夫當政之際，當時的蘇聯終於達到一個空前穩定的境界，西方國家也理解到蘇聯這個社會主義國家不可能自行崩潰——然而，就在十年之後，幾乎是在各種歷史的偶然之下，蘇聯自動解體，全世界為之瞠目結舌。這中間到底發生了什麼事？
精彩的簡史，向讀者呈現蘇聯的複雜故事，
使人更深入地了解這個重要的國家。
◎作者菲茨派翠克（Sheila Fitzpatrick）是蘇聯史的權威，她以清晰的筆觸和深刻的見解，將蘇聯複雜的故事呈現給讀者。內容涵蓋了蘇聯的整個歷史（1922-1991），包括蘇聯的重要時刻，如1917年的十月革命、列寧和史達林的統治、第二次世界大戰、冷戰時期，以及最終的解體。
◎菲茨派翠克以易於理解的方式介紹了蘇聯的政治、經濟、文化和社會發展，並評估了這個國家在20世紀的全球格局中所扮演的角色。儘管本書為簡史，但提供了對於蘇聯的深刻理解，使讀者能夠更好地認識這個重要的歷史時期，敘述中也經常帶有一些黑色幽默。不論是對蘇聯歷史感興趣的學生、還是普通讀者，這本書都有助於掌握蘇聯的關鍵要點和演變過程。
◎書中特別收錄：45張珍貴的歷史照片，以及六幅地圖，包括「帝俄全圖」、「1922年的蘇聯（這幅地圖顯示出所有加盟共和國和部分自治區）」、「第一個五年計畫（1928-1932）的工業區工地」、「第二次世界大戰期間德國在蘇聯占領的地區」、「1945年的蘇聯與東歐」、「俄羅斯聯邦和四鄰國家（2014）」，讓讀者能更完整掌握整段歷史。
蘇聯意外降臨地，又意外地消失。
十月革命一百多年後，蘇聯動蕩的歷史繼續讓我們著迷並持續影響全球政治。這是一段不可抗拒的歷史入口。從十月革命和列寧到史達林的恐怖統治，從第二次世界大戰到戈巴契夫的改革政策，本書是對這七十五年來共產主義統治和帝國崩潰解析的權威之作，歷史學家菲茨派翠克生動地描繪蘇聯時期的關鍵人物，並追溯該政權意外垮台的後果──並導致普欽崛起，以及為何普欽政權是蘇聯系統的產物，而非蘇聯式的借屍還魂，更甚者，中共如何從蘇聯解體中汲取教訓。

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history’s most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society.

This book is a lively and authoritative distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit. The acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick chronicles the Soviet Age—its rise, reign, and unexpected fall, as well as its afterlife in today’s Russia. She underscores the many ironies of the Soviet experience: An ideology that claimed to offer humanity the reins of history wrangled with contingency. An avowedly internationalist and anti-imperialist state birthed an array of nationalisms. And a vision of transcending economic and social inequality and injustice gave rise to a country that was, in its way, surprisingly normal.

Moving seamlessly from Lenin to Stalin to Gorbachev to Putin, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union provides an indispensable guide to one of the twentieth century’s great powers and the enduring fascination it still exerts.