Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick is presented as a historian whose interpretation makes the social transformation of the late 1920s and 1930s central to understanding the October Revolution and Stalinism. Rather than treating collectivization and rapid industrialization as a departure from the revolutionary sequence, her account reads them as part of its internal dynamic. It also gives the purges a paradoxical historical role: they both interrupted revolutionary transformation and preserved its unresolved tensions within the regime.

Revolution and the Question of Thermidor

Fitzpatrick’s chronology distinguishes the unsettled years after 1917 from the decisive transformation that followed. The difficult but enthusiastic period from 1917 to 1921 left society in a state of emergency; the New Economic Policy then consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of the social fabric intact. On this account, the revolutionary sequence did not properly end with the early consolidation of the state. Its decisive conclusion came only in 1937, when the great purges were curtailed and the Party nomenklatura stabilized into a new class.

That periodization shifts the meaning of Thermidor. The book presents the true Thermidor not simply as a retreat from revolutionary aims, but as the moment when the purges were cut short to prevent the Party’s complete destruction and a settled ruling stratum emerged. The result is a tension between institutional stability and a revolutionary legacy that has not been fully extinguished. Repeated purges, in this account, are the form through which that suppressed inheritance continues to haunt the Stalinist order.

Remaking the Social Body

Fitzpatrick identifies the thrust beginning in 1928 as a direct assault on the composition of society. Collectivization aimed to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners, while the old intelligentsia—teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians—was displaced by a new one. The project reached beyond a change of political leadership: it sought to create a different social body and, with it, a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

The account holds together the violence of this transformation and the seriousness of its revolutionary ambition. The years after 1929 were horrific, yet the drive behind them is described as a sincere and enthusiastic will toward total upheaval. That combination matters to the book’s interpretation: the transformation cannot be reduced either to administrative modernization or to a mere betrayal imposed on an otherwise unchanged society. It altered the social relations on which the new order rested.

Moscow as a Measure of Change

Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow across two returns makes the scale of the upheaval concrete. An emigrant who had left in 1914 and returned in 1924 would still have recognized the city: its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge remained familiar. Returning in 1934, after another decade, the same observer would no longer have recognized it, because the texture of social life had changed so extensively.

The contrast gives the historical argument a visible measure. The first decade after departure brought political emergency and then consolidation, but not yet the wholesale remaking of everyday social structure. The transformation initiated in 1928 made the later city unfamiliar in ways that political change alone could not explain. Moscow thus serves as an instance through which Fitzpatrick’s claim about the altered composition of Russian society can be grasped.

Stalinism Within the Revolutionary Trajectory

The book places Fitzpatrick’s account alongside a broader argument about how the revolution’s energies were redirected. It rejects both the view that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation from an otherwise intact Communist project and the view that the project was inherently totalitarian from the outset. The task, as framed there, is to recognize the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential while also confronting the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. Fitzpatrick’s periodization supports this double emphasis by locating the decisive break not at the revolution’s beginning, but in the transformation and eventual stabilization of the 1928–37 sequence.

In the same discussion, the book turns to Isaac Deutscher’s account of forced industrialization and collectivization. Deutscher’s formulation is that a revolutionary force unable to expand beyond the Soviet Union turned inward and violently reshaped Soviet society: collectivization and industrialization substituted for the spread of revolution, while the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad. This is a related interpretation, not a claim attributed to Fitzpatrick. Together, the two accounts frame Stalinist transformation as an inward redirection of revolutionary force, one that remade society while leaving the revolution’s unresolved contradiction embedded in the regime.