Research
After the October Revolution, Bolshevik leaders inherited a vast geographic expanse that was home to nearly 200 distinct ethnicities and languages. Prior to assuming power, Lenin and Stalin had extensively critiqued the tsarist regime’s oppressive policies towards non-Russians and advocated an inclusive approach that would lift up oppressed minorities and eliminate ethnic hierarchies. Their solution, an ethno-territorial federation that guaranteed minorities limited autonomy, sought to unify land and people under a single state. Utilizing multilingual sources from more than 30 archives and libraries in eight countries, my research grapples with this simultaneous complexity and unity through the lens of citizenship. My work sheds light on how various constituencies, from elites in Moscow to villagers in Central Asia, understood the diverse Soviet populace as a coherent whole.
Sites marked in black indicate places I have conducted formal archival research (excluding North America). White dots indicate places I have traveled, including fourteen of fifteen former republics, which have collectively shaped my understanding of and approach to Soviet history.
Repertoires of Citizenship:
Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People
My first book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, draws on legal documents, citizen letters, educational curricula, oral histories, and newspapers to offer a more positive interpretation of Soviet citizenship than historians have typically offered. I argue that leaders promoted a Soviet identity that transcended ethnicity and emphasized citizens’ active involvement in the state beginning shortly after the revolution. People across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum embraced this identity as they identified as citizens, even as various disparities affected claims to and participation in citizenship. My research sheds light not only on how Soviet citizenship was established, cultivated, and practiced in a multiethnic and multilingual environment, but also on how it contributed to the longevity of the state. At the same time, I demonstrate that the negotiation of equality and inequality featured at the core of Soviet citizenship. Despite an official emphasis on equality, citizens encountered myriad inequalities in their everyday lives, the result of both explicitly discriminatory practices and more subtle grades of privilege that distinguished citizens from one another by ethnicity, language, gender, and class.
The manuscript is divided into three parts, which take chronological and thematic approaches to the evolving understandings of citizenship and identity. Part I offers a chronological analysis of state-sponsored discourses and centers around the rise and fall of the concept of the “Soviet people” (sovetskii narod), a collective noun that envisioned the body politic as a unified whole. First invoked in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the concept rallied citizens to make sacrifices and take part in economic and political life. Use of the phrase surged during World War II. Stalin’s successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, continued references to the Soviet people, signaling a more collaborative relationship between state and society. Part II, then, considers how Soviet citizens experienced, participated in, and developed a sense of Soviet identity through practices and encounters. Exploring school curriculum, public letter writing campaigns, civil holidays and rituals, and the use of the Russian language across the entire Soviet period, I illustrate that citizens actively constructed Soviet citizenship and identity in ways that both strengthened and challenged official discourses. Finally, Part III traces the fate of the discourses and practices discussed in Parts I and II, demonstrating that leaders quietly abandoned the concept of the Soviet people in the late 1980s, just as social unrest and frank discussions of deep-seated inequalities betrayed deep social rifts. This part also considers the post-Soviet afterlife of Soviet citizenship and identity.
The book makes three major historiographic interventions. The first returns focus to Soviet identity. Recent scholarship on nationalities policy examines the formation of state-sponsored ethnic identities in the 1920s and 1930s, often interpreting the Soviet collapse as evidence of a failure to cultivate an overarching Soviet identity. In treating the Soviet Union from revolution to collapse, I suggest that political, cultural, and academic elites devoted considerable resources to studying and cultivating civic identity. Moreover, Soviet citizens broadly embraced its promises, despite disparities in their abilities to participate in social, intellectual, and political life. Second, I offer insight into the institutional practices of modern citizenship, which has typically focused on democratic contexts. I locate citizenship in the interaction between a state and its citizens and suggest this can be cultivated in an authoritarian context, challenging the prevailing view that Soviet oppression and a lack of rights made participatory citizenship impossible. Instead, I suggest that the Soviet Union shared much in common with democracies, particularly in its cultivation of civic identity. My focus on an authoritarian state expands the empirical underpinnings of scholarly literature on citizenship, which focuses primarily on democratic contexts. Finally, in its wide geographic and temporal research, my book offers a more integrated approach to Soviet history, shedding light on how the Soviet Union operated as a unified whole across a wide geographic and ethno-linguistic space and offering fresh insight on imperial citizenship.
Cacophony: The Unmaking of the Soviet Union
I am also in the process of completing research for two additional books. The first, Cacophony: The Unmaking of the Soviet Union, considers grassroots mobilization during the Soviet Union's final years. Challenging the top-down narratives that have to-date characterized most work on the Soviet collapse, this book instead draws a portrait of perestroika "from below." Drawing on the voices of citizens across the country, expressed in archival letters, sociological surveys, party reports, and the records of newly formed public organizations, the book highlights the magnitude of challenges facing Soviet leaders. Glasnost (openness), I argue, enabled citizens to express a veritable cacophony of irreconcilable complaints and demands, spelling the country’s demise. The final years of the Soviet Union, this book shows, were extremely polarizing, as citizens interpreted political, economic, and social conditions in radically different ways. These conflicts especially played out in republics, where citizens' mobilized for and against language protections, new alphabets, labor rights, republic sovereignty, and ultimately, independence, deepening growing rifts between citizens. This book extends the ideas of my articles, “An Anxious Unraveling” (Kritika, 2024), on deteriorating interethnic relations, and “Contested Privilege” (JMH, 2023), which reads Russians’ complaints through the lens of privilege and whiteness. This book draws on research collected in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Qazaqstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Ukraine, offering a complex view of the myriad social movements that sprung up in the Soviet Union's final years.
"All-union status for the Russian language." Two protesters express opposition to new legislation in Latvia that elevated Latvian to republic status. LVA 1302.1.11.
“The results of the census help us determine where and how many homes, schools, hospitals, day care centers, and other cultural-lifestyle institutions to build.” Yakut-language poster from the 1939 Census. Source: RGAE 1562.336.1528: 49.
A Mirror for Society:
Censuses in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union
Another book, A Mirror for Society: Censuses in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, takes my research on citizenship in a quantitative direction, focusing on censuses conducted between 1897 and 1989. The shift toward a more accurate and complete counting of the population in the nineteenth century reflected global trends towards quantification, as the late tsarist state sought to expand its reach. Under Soviet rule, population data became a crucial tool for economic planning and for measuring progress. The importance of the latter, however, often threatened the former. This came to tragic ends in 1937, when census data inadvertently showcased significant population decline in the wake of artificial famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Leaders declared the data to be invalid and ordered the execution of the entire statistical apparatus. (Unsurprisingly, their replacements produced more positive results in 1939.) After World War II, in contrast, the census evolved into a more professional, technological institution. With faster data tabulation, new methodology, and improved predictive models, censuses not only counted citizens but helped predict future growth. Data again became politicized in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union edged towards becoming a majority-minority country. As part of my postdoctoral fellowship at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2018–19, I consulted sources in 12 archives in four countries.
All my work draws extensively on multilingual sources from across the former Soviet Union, a synoptic approach that elucidates how the Soviet Union (and Russian Empire) operated as a coherent whole. In my first project, research in “peripheries” has made me more sensitive to subtle inequalities that were embedded in Soviet society. Citizens moved across the vast space of the Soviet Union relatively freely and interacted with one another across ethnic, linguistic, and geographic lines, helping to forge the Soviet people. Processes that culminated in the Soviet collapse, similarly, were especially visible in republics, where mobilization highlighted growing polarization. As one of few truly universal institutions, censuses were defined by audacious plans to interview every citizen in just a couple weeks. Success demanded institutional collaboration across diverse geographic and cultural spaces, suggesting the value of regional archival records. In the late tsarist period, enumerators worked with local elites to create a fuller (if still incomplete) picture of an entire society, counting nomadic steppe populations and women otherwise invisible to Russian enumerators. These collaborations went on to inform Soviet approaches. The broad temporal and geographic reach of my research offers a nuanced portrait of the ever-evolving Soviet Union that acknowledges both its ethnolinguistic complexity and the shared ideas and institutions that bound its citizens together.