Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - History of Eastern Europe

Curriculum Vitae

• Since Oct 2022 Postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University, Department of History, Chair for the History of Eastern Europe
• Sept 2021 –April 2022 Assistant Professor at the European University at Saint Petersburg, Department of History
• Sept 2015- May 2022 PhD in History, Harvard University
• Jan 2013 - Aug 2015 Research Fellow, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences
• Sept 2008 - Oct 2012 Kandidat Nauk in History, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences
• Sept 2006 -June 2008 MA in Cultural Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities
• Sept 2001-June 2006 BA in History, Russian State University for the Humanities

Research

I am currently working on two projects. First, I am finishing a book manuscript entitled “More Equal Than Others: Personal Enrichment and the Quest for Social Justice in the Soviet Union.” It explores how individuals in the USSR enriched themselves, and what financial affluence meant in a country that proclaimed itself egalitarian, nearly eradicated private property, and criminally prosecuted private enterprise. Drawing on debates about wages, profiteering, luxury goods, and retail price policies, the book examines how people in the Soviet Union sought to define the meaning of “true socialism.”

Second, my current DFG-funded project (2025–2028) entitled “Conceptualizing Gender under State Socialism: Research on Women in the Late Soviet Union (1950s–1980s)" investigates the production of knowledge about gender in the late Soviet Union. It focuses on sociological and economic research on women produced across several Soviet republics, including Latvia, Moldova, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. Covering the period from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, the project examines how notions of women’s rights and gender inequality were conceptualized under state socialism.

Publications

Book

Magaziny “Berezka”: Paradoksy Potrebleniia v Pozdnem SSSR [“Beriozka” Stores: Paradoxes of Consumption in the late USSR]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017. (in Russian). (Reviews in Slavic Review, Kritika, and Revue d'Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest)

Articles 

• “Rich Hairdressers and Fancy Car Repairmen: The Rise of a Service Worker Elite and the Evolution of Soviet Society in the 1970s,” Journal of Social History, Volume 56, Issue 4 (2023), 856-881.
• “This Could Only Have Been Done by a Person of the Capitalist Breed”: Retail Price Increases in the Late Soviet Union (1977-1983)” , Cahiers du Monde Russe, 64/1(2023), 63-86.
• “Socialist Consumption and Brezhnev’s Stagnation: a Reappraisal of Late Communist Everyday Life.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17.3 (2016): 665-678.
• “Shopping in Beriozka: Consumer Society in the Soviet Union.” Zeithistorische Forschungen 10.2 (2013): 243- 263.
• “«Samopal pod firmu»: podpol'noe proizvodstvo odezhdy v SSSR v 1960-1980-е-gg. [The Underground Production of Clothes in the USSR in the 1960s-80s],” in Fashion, Consumption and Everyday Culture in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1985, eds.Hausbacher E., Huber E., Hargaßner J. München – Berlin – Washington/D.C. 2014. P. 73-88.
• “Izobrazhenie defitsita v sovetskoi kul'ture vtoroi poloviny 1960-kh – pervoi polovine 1980-kh godov” [Depictions of Shortages in Soviet Cultural Production from the 1960s to the 1980s], Neprikosnovennyi Zapas 3 (2011): 216-235.

Teaching

Humboldt University: 

European University at St. Petersburg:

•  Writing a History Paper, Spring 2022
•  History of the Soviet Union: Seminar, Spring 2022
•  History of Consumption in Soviet Russia, Fall 2021
•  Theory and Methods in the Study of History, Fall 2021

Harvard University:

• Intro to Harvard History (Teaching Fellow), Spring 2021
• The Soviet Empire, 1917-1991 (Teaching Fellow), Fall 2020
• History of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (Teaching Fellow), Spring 2020
• Modern Europe: 1789 to the present (Teaching Fellow), Fall 2019