Postdoctoral Research Fellow GRK-2840 Dr. Liudmila Novikova

I am a scholar of twentieth-century Russian political and social history with a particular focus on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as well as World War II. My first book An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North (2018; published also in Russian and in Italian) is a regional study of the anti-Bolshevik resistance, in particular of the movement’s revolutionary agenda, and the nature of its popular support. My second book project deals with the Soviet home front and Soviet-Allied cooperation in the USSR’s northern ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk during World War II. It tells the dramatic story of the Soviet struggle for survival and the challenges of the inter-allied cooperation on the local level, when former archenemies turned into allies, albeit for a brief period of time. I have also authored journal articles and book chapters, and edited several collected volumes on various aspects of the Russian Revolution and Civil War as well as Soviet participation in World War II. Additionally, I served as associate editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies, and for ten years worked as Associate Professor in History and Deputy Director of the Higher School of Economics’ International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences in Moscow. 

2024  Research Fellow, Heidelberg University
2013-2023  Deputy Director, International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences, and Associate Professor in History, School of History, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
2005-2013  Lecturer in Russian and European History, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
2004-2005  Visiting Scholar, University of Notre Dame, USA
2004  PhD (Candidacy degree in History), Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
1996  BA/MA (Diploma of Higher Education), Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and edited volumes

An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North / Translated from the Russian by Seth Bernstein (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).
Russian edition: Provintsial’naia “kontr-revoliutsiia”: Beloe dvizhenie i grazhdanskaia voina na Russkom Severe (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011).
Italian translation: La “controrivoluzione” in provincia. Movimento bianco e Guerra civile nella Russia del nord, 1917-1920 / Translated from the Russian by Giovanna Piera Viale (Rome: Viella, 2015).

Garvardskii proekt: rassekrechennye svidetel’stva o Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Harvard Interview Project: Declassified Accounts of the Great Patriotic War) (co-edited with Oleg Budnitskii) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2018).

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22. Book 1: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (co-edited with Sarah Badcock and Aaron Retish) (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2015) 

SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsiia. Kholokost. Stalinizm (The Soviet Union in World War II: Occupation. Holocaust. Stalinism) (co-edited with Oleg Budnitskii) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014).

Selected articles and book chapters

“The 1942 ‘Egg Expeditions’ to Novaya Zemlya and the Battle for Food in the Wartime Soviet Union,” Russian Review 83: 2 (April 2024): 209-226 (open access - https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12598).

“Everyday Life, Work, and Survival on the Soviet Home Front in World War II,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 24: 1 (2023): 207-220.

“Criminalized Liaisons: Soviet Women and Allied Sailors in Wartime Arkhangel’sk,” Journal of Contemporary History 55: 4 (2020): 745-763.

“Poslednii Lenin: sovetskaia toponimika i simvolicheskaia transformatsiia v Arkhangel’ske v 1990-e gg.” (The Last Lenin: Soviet Toponymies and Symbolic Transformation in Arkhangel’sk in the 1990s), Ab Imperio 2 (2020): 137-169.

“Red Patriots against White Patriots: Contesting Patriotism in the Civil War in North Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 71: 2 (2019): 183-202.

“Horizonterweiterung: Zur Historiographie der Russischen Revolution,” Osteuropa 67: 6-8 (2017): 295-304.

“The Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16: 4 (2015): 769-785.

“Zemstvo, State, and Peasants in Arkhangel’sk Province, 1917-20,” in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22. Book 1: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective, eds. Sarah Badcock, Liudmila Novikova and Aaron Retish (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2015), 87-108.

“Kontinuum der Gewalt: Der Norden Russlands 1914–1920,” Osteuropa 64: 2-4 (2014): 157-170.

“Russia’s Red Revolutionary and White Terror, 1917–1921: a Provincial Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 65: 9 (2013): 1755-1770.

“Il grano e le armi. Rivoluzione, “controrivoluzione” e guerra civile popolare nella Russia del Nord, 1917-1920,” Rivista storica italiana CXXIV: 2 (2012): 734-763.