His latest book, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union , Country Email List was published 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and in a context in which Russia and its neighbors are once again at the center Country Email List of debates on global politics. Why is it important to retrace Soviet history? If I wanted to understand Country Email List the present, the first thing I would tackle as a reader of this book would, in fact, be the last chapters. In them she recounted and analyzed the rupture and fall of the USSR . Understanding the disintegration of the.
USSR , as well as the forms and causes by which this process occurred, is Country Email List very relevant to understanding the present. From my point of view, the importance of this book is different, since I am obviously not its reader but its author. I was commissioned in 2020 and I wrote it in 2021. And what was really interesting to me was the Country Email List fact that, with the collapse of the ussr , that story had a beginning and an end. Normally, Country Email List we write history and there is no end, it is a continuous process that is sustained over time. But in this story we have a beginning and.
An end that can be clearly defined. That imposes a different perspective from Country Email List that of other historical episodes. And that is the interest for me: to take a step back and see that history as something finite Country Email List and not as an ongoing project. Your father, Brian Fitzpatrick, was a prominent civil rights activist as well as a democratic socialist who, as you said yourself, liked to shock the bourgeoisie. How much did family background influence Country Email List you in defining Soviet history as your field of study? It influenced me, although not always directly. I would identify two very particular issues. One is that, as a teenager in the 1950s.