Sheila Fitzpatrick's reflections make for illuminating reading as an autobiographical text. Two basic forces, she suggests, have shaped her as a researcher over the years and were present at the inception of a tremendously productive scholarly career. These two forces in combination may also better define her research agenda than the much used and abused term revisionism. One of them is positive; it is her belief in the archive as a repository of historical truth. From this belief flows her conviction that good historians are empiricists who engage in "lots of hard work on primary sources." Fitzpatrick herself has played a pivotal role in accessing ever new source materials and suggesting ways of making them speak; there are few Soviet historians who can match her first-hand archival expertise.