Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
A Spy in the Archives, Paperback / softback Book

A Spy in the Archives Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Item not Available

Description

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 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 felt more at ease in Moscow than in Britainâ??a feeling cemented by her friendships with Lunacharsky's daughter, Irina, and brother-in-law, Igor, a reform-minded old Bolshevik who became a surrogate father and a intellectual mentor.

An affair with young Communist activist, Sasha, pulled her further into a world in which she already felt at home.

For the Soviet authorities and archives, however, she would always be marked as a foreigner, and so potentially a spy. Punctuated by letters to her mother in Melbourne and her diary entries of the time, and borne along by Fitzpatrick's wry, insightful narrative, A Spy in the Archives captures the life and times of Cold War Russia.

Information

£37.50

Item not Available
Item not Available
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information