The Shortest History of the Soviet Union by Sheila Fitzpatrick | Black Inc.

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

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About the author

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the multi-award-winning author of My Father’s Daughter, Mischka’s War, On Stalin’s Team and The Russian Revolution, among other titles. She is a regular contributor to the London Review …

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The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

Praise for The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

‘Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Shortest History of the Soviet Union comes as close to a miracle as an academic book can. It is written for the general public that wants a clear overview of the topic, but offers at the same time a concise and well-balanced synthesis of decades of Soviet Studies. It is an immensely readable overview of the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, full of anecdotes and lively detail, but also meeting the highest academic standards. It avoids all extreme political passions, but its pages are nonetheless permeated by a gut moral sense. When things get really horrible, only black comedy can adequately render the situation – every pathetic sense of tragedy is already a fake. In this vein, I would add that if I were a Stalinist, I would have said that those who ignore this book deserve … if not a Gulag sentence, then at least a year or two of harsh re-education!’ —Slavoj Žižek

‘Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is an opportunity for the world-renowned Australian Sovietologist to present history with greater nuance than the lingering Cold War version of the Black Marias, bread lines and gulags.’ —Kurt Johnson, The Saturday Age

‘Fitzpatrick’s hugely authoritative The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is all the more lively for leaving open the many possible outcomes of Soviet evolution.’ —The Times Literary Supplement

‘One of the great virtues of such short histories is that they emphasise what specialists may regard as the bleeding obvious – but it is the obvious truths often buried in detail that bear restating.’ —Owen Matthews, The Spectator

‘Her wit and humour make for a highly readable introduction to the period’ —Jonathan Z. Ludwig, Europe-Asia Studies

More from Sheila Fitzpatrick

Half black, half red cover with silhouette of a man in a hat walking with white text.