<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#f9f9fa">
<p> </p>
<div id="toolbar" class="toolbar-container"> </div>
<div class="container" style="--line-height: 1.6em;" dir="ltr"
lang="en">
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Antony%27s_College,_Oxford#cite_note-6">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Antony%27s_College,_Oxford#cite_note-6</a></div>
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><br>
</div>
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><a
class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theconversation.com/back-in-the-ussr-my-life-as-a-spy-in-the-archives-26303">theconversation.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">Back in the USSR: my life as a 'spy' in
the archives</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Sheila Fitzpatrick</div>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">6-8 minutes</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<p>Spies were a glamour news item in Western (and Soviet)
press in the 1960s; it was the age of <a
href="http://www.historytoday.com/boris-volodarsky/kim-philby-living-lie">Kim
Philby</a>, British spymaster-cum-Soviet spy, and the
endless media hunt for the “<a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/cambridgespies/7813.shtml">fifth
man</a>” of the Cambridge Five. That’s the environment
I entered in September 1966, when I went to Moscow as a
British Council Exchange student. </p>
<p>It’s hard to convey how exotic and potentially perilous
Moscow seemed to Westerners then. This was the height of
the Cold War, when scarcely any foreigners could live
for a year in Moscow alongside Soviet citizens, and we
British students (I was actually an Australian, but it
was a British exchange) were specially briefed by
someone from MI6 about the dangers of making Soviet
friends, since they would all be spies and assume the
same of us. </p>
<figure> <a
href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">
<p><img alt=""
data-src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
data-srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1
600w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2
1200w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3
1800w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1
754w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2
1508w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3
2262w"
src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48221/original/qgxsd2t5-1399859810.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></p>
</a> <figcaption> <span class="caption">Sheila at
Kuznetskii bridge over Moscow river, 1969.</span> <span><span>Author's
image. </span></span> </figcaption> </figure>
<p>Presumably there were some real spies in our British
group; there certainly were in the Soviet group sent to
Britain, since one of them ended up as No. 3 man in the
KGB. I myself was not a spy, even though the place I was
doing my Soviet history doctorate, St Antony’s in
Oxford, was notorious in both the British and Soviet
press as a “spy college”, having been founded after the
war by ex-intelligence people. </p>
<p>But sometimes I felt like one, just because, from the
Soviet standpoint, anyone who tried to find out things
the Soviet Union didn’t want known about itself and its
history qualified as a spy.</p>
<p>I spent three lonely months falling in love with Moscow
but knowing almost nobody. Then I made Russian friends,
as most of the British group did, who turned out to be
friends for life. </p>
<p>The KGB was interested in our friends and lovers, up to
a point, but what they really disapproved of was
marriage between a Soviet citizen and a foreigner. </p>
<p>Although it was no longer against the law, it was hard
to do, and harder still to export your spouse once you
had married them. There were sad cases of foreigners who
had married Russians and stayed in the Soviet Union,
cast off by their embassies and under pressure from the
Soviets to give up their British or American passports.
Those passports were our most precious possession: they
meant that, unlike Soviet citizens, we could leave the
country.</p>
<figure> <a
href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">
<p><img alt=""
data-src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"
data-srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1
600w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2
1200w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3
1800w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1
754w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2
1508w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3
2262w"
src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47780/original/cy3ww2js-1399262070.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></p>
</a> <figcaption> <span class="caption">Soviet
citizens in Moscow, 1969.</span> <span><span>Rob
Ketcherside</span></span> </figcaption> </figure>
<p>The only thing as exciting as my new friendships were
the archives. Foreigners were generally not allowed into
archives of the Soviet period in case they found out
“state secrets”, a Soviet obsession, but I had a
relatively innocuous topic (Soviet education in the
1920s) and managed to gain limited access. </p>
<figure> <a
href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">
<p><img alt=""
data-src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
data-srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1
600w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2
1200w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3
1800w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=1
754w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=2
1508w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=3
2262w"
src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48219/original/bkgdy6zj-1399859517.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></p>
</a> <figcaption> <span class="caption">The State
Archives – unchanged – in 2012.</span> <span><span>Author's
image.</span></span> </figcaption> </figure>
<p>It was a constant battle of wits with the archivists to
get the material you wanted, particularly since the
inventories of what they had were themselves state
secrets, so you had to guess. Absolutely off limits were
classified documents and because of the obsession with
secrecy, many documents were classified. </p>
<p>But it turned out that, even with unclassified
documents, you could find out a lot. That process felt
so surreptitious that if they had arrested and
interrogated me, I might have broken down and confessed
to being a spy. But it wasn’t the Stalin period any
more, so they weren’t going to arrest me as long as I
was on the official British exchange. The worst thing
they could do was to declare me <em>persona non grata</em>
and throw me out of the country. </p>
<p>That happened to a handful of foreign students each
year; and I might have been one of them, since at the
end of my first year I was denounced in the newspaper
Sovetskaia Rossiia as “next thing to a spy” for writing
an allegedly defamatory article about Soviet history.
But I was lucky: the article was published under my
maiden name and nobody made the connection.</p>
<figure> <a
href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">
<p><img alt=""
data-src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
data-srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1
600w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2
1200w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3
1800w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=1
754w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=2
1508w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=3
2262w"
src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48222/original/q6dgbq9v-1399860019.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></p>
</a> <figcaption> <span class="caption">A 1968 article
in newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia denouncing the
author as the “next thing to a spy”.</span> <span><span>Author's
image</span></span> </figcaption> </figure>
<p>I had been a Soviet historian, practising my trade in
the United States, for more than 20 years when in 1991
the Soviet Union collapsed. No one expected it, least of
all the Russian population, who watched in bewilderment
as erstwhile Soviet officials pocketed whatever state
asset they had their hands on when the music stopped,
from real estate to whole republics.</p>
<p>For Russians, the great thing about the collapse was
that the borders opened and they were able to travel
abroad; the worst thing was that they lost all the
“fraternal” republics and found out that at least some
of their brothers thought they were imperialists. For
historians, it was a wonderful time because we were
suddenly able to read the classified part of the
archives – in effect, dig up all the dirt. </p>
<figure> <a
href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">
<p><img alt=""
data-src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"
data-srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1
600w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2
1200w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3
1800w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1
754w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2
1508w,
https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3
2262w"
src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48225/original/dtzn6rmh-1399860579.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></p>
</a> <figcaption> <span class="caption">Moscow State
University, 1969.</span> <span><span>Rob
Ketcherside</span></span> </figcaption> </figure>
<p>Or nearly all: while the Communist Party’s archive
opened because the formerly ruling party was now no
longer in power, the KGB archive stayed closed, for the
opposite reason. The KGB, renamed FSB, was one Soviet
institution that survived the debacle more or less
intact. It makes sense that the strongest and savviest
of Russia’s post-Soviet leaders, Vladimir Putin, should
have come from its ranks.</p>
<p>In the old Soviet Union, you didn’t joke about being a
spy, any more than you would now joke at any
international airport about being a terrorist with a
bomb. I’d forgotten that when I wrote my Soviet memoir
and called it A Spy in the Archives; or perhaps I
thought it was no longer relevant, since the Soviet
Union was dead. Russian friends quickly set me right: if
you’re a foreigner and have any sense, you still don’t
joke about being a spy. </p>
<p>And if you write about the second world war, you’d
better be careful not to disrespect the Soviet war
effort – you can get five years prison for that,
according to a <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/world/europe/russia-revisits-its-history-to-nail-down-its-future.html">Russian
law passed this month</a>. </p>
<p><em>Sheila Fitzpatrick is author of <a
href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/fitzpatrick-sheila/spy-in-the-archives-9780522861181.aspx">A
Spy in the Archives</a> (Melbourne University Press,
2013) and many books on Soviet history. She will be <a
href="http://sydney.edu.au/arts/sydney_writers_festival/our_experts/sheila_fitzpatrick.shtml">giving
a Curiosity Lecture</a> on the Soviet Union at the <a
href="http://www.swf.org.au/">Sydney Writers’
Festival</a> on May 24.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>