Phd in HISTORY OF EUROPE

Research: Soviet Ethnic Cleansing in the Memory of Ethnic Minorities: Perceptions and Collective Trauma

I have been studying Soviet history and international relations for more than eight years, but for the past four years, my academic interests have turned to the history of totalitarian regimes within Europe and the collective memory of this experience.

My background includes conducting grant research, organising ethnographic expeditions to collect oral and written sources, and participating in international research groups on historical memory and Transitional Justice in Berlin, Warsaw, and Seoul.

My doctoral thesis focuses on the problems of the collective memory of ethnic cleansing on the territory of the USSR and in the occupied regions in the 1930s and 1950s.

This study focuses on the problems of ethnic repression in the USSR and the diversity of collective memory of this side of the totalitarian past in contemporary Russia. For a long time, the issue of ethnic cleansing during the Stalinist period remained on the margins of academic interest in both Russian and foreign historians for two main reasons. Firstly, Russian archives are classified and it is impossible to obtain sources on political and ethnic repression. Secondly, to acknowledge the fact that the Soviet Union sent people to concentration camps on the basis of nationality and race is to put it on a par with the Nazi regime. However, the study uses hundreds of unique interviews gathered from the mouths of victims of these repressions during ethnographic expeditions. And these sources provide irrefutable evidence and oblige historians to finally allow the voice of the victims to be heard in the global narrative of totalitarian regimes.