Traumatised Minds Project-Meet The Team

Viktoria Vorobeva

Viktoria Vorobeva is an Affiliated Researcher on the “Traumatised Minds” project at the University of Warwick (funded by the Wellcome Trust). She holds a BA in Philology (SPBU, 2017) and an MA in Digital Humanities (HSE University, Moscow, 2022). Her research lies at the intersection of digital humanities, cultural history, and the study of autobiographical narratives.

Applying computational methods and data analysis to digital collections of autobiographical material, primarily from the Soviet period, Viktoria examines how individuals processed contemporaneous events and emotional realities. She analyzes these accounts both at the level of private reflection and on a broader social scale, tracing collective tendencies that represent wider cultural paradigms. The results of this work were published in a recent co-authored article on the computational analysis of Soviet diaries in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Expanding her work with ego-documents, she has also studied the personal records of Soviet readers of Sigmund Freud, presenting this research at the “Cultures of Trauma and the Medical Humanities” workshop at the University of Warwick.

In her current role on the “Traumatised Minds” project, Viktoria applies this framework to the history of medicine, working extensively with Russian and Georgian archival materials. She examines how psychiatric and physiological theories were integrated into Soviet medical practice and psychotherapy, analyzing the work of prominent medical professionals such as Mikheil Asatiani and Dimitri Uznadze alongside less widely known specialists, including Arkadi Gotsiridze and Ivane Skhirtladze. Viktoria is particularly interested in the clinical application of practices such as hypnosis, balneology, sleep therapy, and occupational therapy within Soviet psychiatry.

Olga Smolyak

I am a social historian working at the intersection of intellectual history and material culture. My expertise in twentieth-century Russia developed through historical and anthropological research on everyday life and resource theft at enterprises in the USSR. Drawing on archival findings and interviews, I described do-it-yourself practices as a system of reciprocal exchanges. These exchanges represented the socialist idea of collective ownership. In my 2024 thesis, I examined discourses on Soviet domestic space from the 1960s to the 1980s. I engaged with psychological concepts of personality and sociological debates on family policy and the “second shift.”

I want to bring my expertise in institutional history and discourse analysis to Traumatised Minds and examine balneological sanatoriums in the Soviet Union as sites where trauma, discipline, and care intersected. I hypothesise that the therapeutic rhetoric in these institutions often masks disciplinary practices, privileging social usefulness over individual well-being. This tension between narratives of care and institutional realities highlights my central argument: medicine in these settings served as a tool of social ordering, with balneology providing a clear lens to trace this dynamic.

Balneology embodied the Soviet ideal of the person as a manageable, improvable body. My central argument is that balneological sanatoriums provided institutional frameworks in which trauma was addressed somatically and collectively, rather than being named or individualised. Treatments emphasised restoring physical function and productivity, transforming leisure into therapeutic labour. Through scheduled treatments, surveillance, and bodily regulation, these institutions offered somatic responses to distress—aligning care, discipline, and health with socialist ideals while concealing individual trauma within collective well-being.

My research plan includes studying balneological sanatoriums in Issyk-Ata (Kyrgyzstan), Arasan-Kapal (Kazakhstan), Borzhomi (Georgia), Druskininkai (Lithuania), Kemeri (Latvia), and Haapsalu (Estonia). Studying these long-standing sites enables comparative analysis across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic region.

By situating balneological sanatoriums at the intersection of medicine, culture, and governance, my research shows how the Soviet response to trauma was embedded in institutional practices of collective care and control. I aim to advance Traumatised Minds by demonstrating that, in these settings, trauma circulated beyond the clinic and acquired meanings shaped by state priorities and social norms.

Anna Toropova

I am a cultural and medical historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, and the PI on Traumatised Minds. My previous research explored the role played by cinema in the transformation of the human subject, and the ways that Soviet political and cultural agendas overlapped with the psy disciplines.

My current research focuses on how medical specialists, cultural producers and members of the public understood the link between neurosis and trauma in the Soviet Union between 1917-1953. In a recent article published in Isis, I explore cinematic engagements with the topic of neurosis to re-examine the extent to which the Soviet psy-disciplines were subordinated to a biological model of the mind in the Stalin era. In another forthcoming publication, I explore the representation of hysteria and war neurosis in late Stalinist melodrama. I am currently working on a comparative study of therapeutic approaches to the treatment of neurosis in Soviet Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia and Uzbekistan. I am also exploring early Soviet research on the problem of child nervousness.