CivilnetHistorians Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ronald Suny, and Yuri Slezkine reflect on their professional journeys as scholars of the Soviet Union and Russia. The conversation was held on July 3 in Yerevan during a symposium organized by the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The 2025 Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia ran from June 25 to July 13, with sessions in Batumi, Yerevan, and Tbilisi.
Key points from the discussion
Ronald Suny traced his journey from a culturally Armenian but politically non-nationalist upbringing in the United States to becoming a leading historian of Soviet nationalities. He recalled how a sixth-grade classroom report defending the Soviet Union during McCarthyism earned him the nickname “Comrade Suny,” and how an accidental dissertation topic choice led to his first book on the Baku Commune. Influenced by British Marxist historians, he embraced a socially focused, critical approach, cautioning against the distortions of nationalist history and insisting that “truth is revolutionary.”
Sheila Fitzpatrick described a path that began in Australia and led to Oxford, where her dissertation on Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Commissariat of Enlightenment opened unexpected archival doors in the Soviet Union. These early discoveries challenged the prevailing totalitarian model and informed her long-term interest in how individuals and institutions pursued their own agendas within imposed frameworks. Her later work ranged from social mobility and everyday Stalinism to high politics in On Stalin’s Team, and to studies of migration and displaced persons, all grounded in the conviction that the choice of research dates and topics shapes the story told.
Yuri Slezkine recounted his upbringing between two starkly different family legacies—Jewish communists from Argentina who settled in Birobidzhan and a lineage of tsarist cavalry officers—and his eventual migration from the Soviet Union to Africa, Portugal, and finally graduate school in Texas. Initially intent on African history, he shifted to Soviet history under Fitzpatrick’s guidance, producing a dissertation on the “small peoples of the North” and later major works such as The Jewish Century and The House of Government. He emphasized the value of pursuing subjects that are personally meaningful, noting that much of his scholarship grew from his own experiences and observations of Soviet life.
