Dimensions
135 x 200 x 28mm
In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was 'outed' by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as a spy for the British government. A graduate student at Oxford, Fitzpatrick had spent time in Moscow to access several of its archives for her doctoral research on AV Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Despite KGB attention, and the impossibility of finding a suitable winter coat, Sheila feels more at home in Moscow than anywhere else a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's brother-in-law, Igor, and daughter, Irina. Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.