Since the 1960s, the Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has devoted her career to trying to understand the USSR — what it was, how it worked, and what it meant. Her work, based always on close reading of the archives, became in the 1970s the leading part of an unofficial “revisionist” school of social historians who rejected the notion that the USSR was a completely controlled totalitarian state.

Fitzpatrick was born and raised in postwar Australia, where her father Brian was a nonconforming socialist journalist — an experience she wrote about in her memoir My Father’s Daughter. A few years ago, Fitzpatrick returned to her native country, where she has been applying the same methods of archival research and revisionist attention to histories from below to the story of postwar migration to Australia.

Owen Hatherley talked to her about her new book White Russians, Red Peril, which tells the story of the thousands of Soviet citizens and ethnic Russians who migrated to Australia in the 1940s and ’50s.