You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

My guest this week is the historian Shida Fitzpatrick, whose many books include everyday Stalinism and

most recently, out just now, the shortest history of the Soviet Union. Her latest piece

for the LRB was a diary published in September, responding in part to a book by the Russian anthropologist

Albert Baiburin, a history of the Soviet internal passport.

Hello, Sheila, and thank you very much for talking to me today.

Hello, it's a pleasure.

So one of the, which is possibly surprising things that your diary makes clear,

is just how many different kinds of passport there are or there have been.

And I thought maybe to begin, you could tell the story of your first visits to Russia as a graduate student in 1965, was it?

Right.

When I first went to the Soviet Union, or rather when I went for the first extended period,

that's 1966.

And it had been quite difficult to get myself there because of a passport

question. In other words, I was Australian and the Australians did not have an exchange

with the Soviet Union. That was the only way you could get there for an extended period. You

had to be authorized by some government.

And the British had an exchange, but I wasn't British.

So I tried to get myself on the British exchange as an Australian and had a long correspondence

with the Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Office, and so on.

And finally, very politely, they turned me down.

And I then decided to go another route.

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