Isabelle DeSisto Valentina [1] was born in exile in Krasnoyarsk, the second-largest city in Siberia, to an ethnic German father and a Moldovan mother, both of whom had been deported from their homes under the orders of Josef Stalin. Valentina returned to Moldova – then the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) – in the 1960s. Because of her background, she was not allowed to study law at university. Nevertheless, she told me in our interview, “I received a good education

Donald Morard In 1965, the French Communist journal Démocratie Nouvelle,  in its special issue on the “young, advanced republic” of Estonia, described the occupied Baltic country as a “laboratory” for the future of the Soviet economy. In an article titled “Un Domaine d’experimentation Economique” (“A space for economic experimentation”), Estonia was presented as an ideal space for the Soviet government to test new forms and methods of economic management to later be scaled up

Hanna Matt Drawing on my dissertation research on displacement and famine in Central Asia, this blog post will reflect on the...

Malika Zehni “… While the people of Bokhara were asleep… They set fire to the city and threw bombs from aeroplanes,” read the opening...

Mira Kuzhakhmetova The first migrations of Koreans to the Russian Far East were recorded in the second half of the nineteenth century....

Tyson Luneau “…this immense sea, a sea reaching to the horizon, a blue sea crisscrossed by the flights of birds…A dream: Lake Baikal,...

Emanuela Grama “I don’t remember having seen this file before,” the archivist told me when he returned from the stacks to the reading...