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Una espía en los archivos soviéticos: Memorias de la Guerra Fría en Rusia (Pasados que Insisten)
En 1966, en plena Guerra Fría, la historiadora Sheila Fitzpatrick, por entonces una estudiante de doctorado en Oxford, se instala en Moscú para consultar archivos oficiales nunca antes explorados. Tiene 25 años, es tímida y no domina el idioma. Pero la impulsan una avidez intelectual inquebrantable y una incapacidad temperamental para ver las cosas en blanco y negro.
Pasa las primeras semanas casi sin hablar con nadie, caminando. No le interesa entrar en contacto con jóvenes fascinados por los productos de consumo occidentales, ni con poetas o artistas disidentes, ni con opositores del gobierno. Quiere conocer a los rusos que no buscan a los extranjeros, saber cómo viven y qué piensan. Y eso hace durante tres años de aprendizaje intenso. En ese universo de sospechas y trampas cruzadas en que la KGB puede acusar de espía a cualquiera –sobre todo, a estudiantes como ella–, Fitzpatrick sostiene una posición incó se opone a sus profesores ingleses que ven a la URSS como un régimen totalitario y represivo sin fisuras, también a los militantes que todavía creen en la utopía socialista.
Con inteligencia y encanto, Sheila Fitzpatrick reconstruye todas las capas de ese período formativo en su vida personal y profesional. Cuenta qué estrategias improvisa para acceder a esa mina de oro que son los archivos –rigurosamente vigilados– y cómo aprende a leerlos entre líneas, hasta qué punto las dificultades para moverse en transporte público o conseguir comida y abrigo no le impiden ser más feliz que nunca, cómo su propia perspectiva de historiadora se construye en un vínculo entrañable con un viejo intelectual bolchevique, tutor de su tesis. Este libro ofrece una visión única, llena de color, de la vida cotidiana en el Moscú postestalinista.
Pasa las primeras semanas casi sin hablar con nadie, caminando. No le interesa entrar en contacto con jóvenes fascinados por los productos de consumo occidentales, ni con poetas o artistas disidentes, ni con opositores del gobierno. Quiere conocer a los rusos que no buscan a los extranjeros, saber cómo viven y qué piensan. Y eso hace durante tres años de aprendizaje intenso. En ese universo de sospechas y trampas cruzadas en que la KGB puede acusar de espía a cualquiera –sobre todo, a estudiantes como ella–, Fitzpatrick sostiene una posición incó se opone a sus profesores ingleses que ven a la URSS como un régimen totalitario y represivo sin fisuras, también a los militantes que todavía creen en la utopía socialista.
Con inteligencia y encanto, Sheila Fitzpatrick reconstruye todas las capas de ese período formativo en su vida personal y profesional. Cuenta qué estrategias improvisa para acceder a esa mina de oro que son los archivos –rigurosamente vigilados– y cómo aprende a leerlos entre líneas, hasta qué punto las dificultades para moverse en transporte público o conseguir comida y abrigo no le impiden ser más feliz que nunca, cómo su propia perspectiva de historiadora se construye en un vínculo entrañable con un viejo intelectual bolchevique, tutor de su tesis. Este libro ofrece una visión única, llena de color, de la vida cotidiana en el Moscú postestalinista.
395 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 20, 2025
About the author
Sheila Fitzpatrick
43 books156 followersSheila Fitzpatrick (born June 4, 1941, Melbourne) is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
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