Revisionist trailblazer who reconstructed Soviet social history 'from below'
'Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution's centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall.' ('What's Left?', LRB, 2017)
The Australian-born historian who led the revisionist school of Soviet studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, with works like Education and Social Mobility, The Russian Revolution, Stalin's Peasants, and Everyday Stalinism, she pioneered a 'history from below' that read the Soviet system through the eyes of workers, peasants, and city-dwellers rather than the state and its leaders. In her 2017 LRB essay 'What's Left?', she surveyed the centenary histories of the October Revolution and mapped the three dominant frameworks (the totalitarian model, revisionist social history, and the post-1991 consensus that the revolution was a 'historical dead end'), arguing that the revolution's path to Stalinism was the product of social dynamics, not inevitability, a stance that unsettled both Cold War orthodoxy and its Marxist critics.
Career Timeline
- 1961BA, University of Melbourne
- 1969D.Phil., St Antony's College, Oxford
- 1976Assistant then Associate Professor, Columbia University
- 1980Professor, University of Texas at Austin
- 1990Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago (until 2012)
- 2012Professor, Australian Catholic University; Honorary Professor, University of Sydney