Stalin and the World of Culture

Stalin and the World of Culture - Talk by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Wed 22 June 2011 – 7.00pm

Language: In English

Stalin intimidated the Russian intelligentsia, but the converse was also true. Members of Stalinist faction envied the ease with which political opponents like Kamenev and Bukharin interacted with intellectuals and artists in the 1920s. In the 1930s, many of Stalin’s associates established their own patronage networks with the cultural élite, though Stalin remained aloof, cultivating an air of mystery which made his periodic interventions all the more notable. After the war, the leaders – Stalin included – found that their grown-up children were not only marrying into the intelligentsia but had become intellectuals themselves. The talk focuses on the complex and multi-faceted relationship of Soviet political leaders to the world of culture as it evolved from the beginning of the 1930s to the 1950s.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. Her recent books include Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Russia in the 1930s (2000), Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005) and Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union from the 1920s-1940s (2008). She is currently working on two books: Stalin and his Team, a political ethnography of the top Soviet leadership from the late 1920s to the mid 1950s and A Spy in the Archives, a memoir of life in Moscow as a British exchange student in the 1960s.

Tickets:£5 Book Tickets