How the USA Got the Soviet Union Wrong and Made Cold War 2.0 Worse | Historian, Sheila Fitzpatrick

In this interview, acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick joins The Burning Archive to discuss her book The Death of Stalin and the wider arc of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. We cover Stalin's death and Eisenhower's scepticism toward Soviet peace overtures, the "moral panic" quality of 1950s American perceptions of the USSR, and the chronic weakness of Western intelligence on the Kremlin compared to Soviet espionage in the West. Fitzpatrick reflects on the Khrushchev Thaw and its atmosphere of possibility, the lingering spectre of Stalin in post-Stalin politics, and how the totalitarian model still shapes Western imagination decades on. We also discuss today's "second Cold War" framing — the puzzling persistence of Russophobia given Russia's diminished superpower status, and the near-total collapse of Western scholarly access to Russian archives since the Ukraine war. Fitzpatrick draws too on her book Lost Souls, on displaced persons from the Soviet Union after WWII, and closes with reflections on Vladislav Zubok's Cold War historiography and how the original Cold War, for all its dangers, was less dangerous than very hot Cold War 2.0. ✨Dive deep into history at https://jeffrich.substack.com ✨Watch the full interview Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick on The Death of Stalin & the Cold War One and Cold War Two (June 2025) here    • Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick on The Death ...   ------------------------------------------------------------ Inquiries: [email protected]