Liudmila Lyagushkina
Thesis Title: From arrest to arrest: experiences of the re-convicted victims of Stalinist terror in the USSR, 1930-1953
The issue of mass terror under dictatorships has traditionally attracted great attention, and scholars have intensively studied the case of the Soviet Union after the 1990s archival revolution. However, the central question of the exact number of victims of Stalinism is still widely debated. This is, not least, because for precise estimation researchers need to identify the number of so-called ‘repeaters’ (‘povtorniky’), i.e. people arrested multiple times during Stalin’s rule. The proposed research will offer an estimation of the number of ‘repeaters’. Their case will also tell a lot about the long-term strategies for survival under totalitarianism. The unique history of over 20 years of Stalinism provides abundant material for a longitudinal study. Finally, the study will enrich the historiography of the state security agencies. It will estimate if the specific ethnicities or social or gender groups of ‘repeaters’ were disproportionately targeted. The principal source base for this research is a large-scale online database, Victims of Political Terror in the USSR (Memorial, 2017), which includes more than 3 million short biographies. Additionally, I shall examine a digital collection of terror victims’ case files from the Moscow Region from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Methodologically, this research project will use complex data-analytics tools to identify within the database subsequent arrests of the same person with a high degree of probability. For example, machine-learning algorithms will be used to classify victims’ social profiles, and georeferencing for tracking changes in victims’ places of birth and residence.
Biography
Liudmila Lyagushkina is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham. In 2021-2022, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (ISPI) at the HSE University in Moscow, Russia. She defended her Candidate of Sciences dissertation at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2016. In 2021, she enrolled in a one-year program in applied data analytics delivered by the European University at Saint Petersburg. Liudmila’s research interests include social history, the history of Stalinism and terror, computational history, and digital humanities.
Publications
‘International conference “War and Soviet everyday life: new sources and interpretations”’, New Literary Review, № 4, 2022 (in press), with Elizaveta Khatanzeyskaya ‘Classification of the occupations of the victims of terror in the USSR using SVM’, Historical Information Science, №1, 2022.
‘Machine learning in historical research: classification of occupations of the victims of terror in the USSR’, Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Cultural Heritage in the Digital Dimension’, Perm, 2021.
‘Social ‘portrait’ of the Great Terror victims (1937-1938) in RSFSR: a comparative analysis of databases created on the material of regional “Books of memory”’, Candidate of Sciences dissertation, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2016, https://www.hist.msu.ru/Science/Disser/Lyagushkina.pdf ‘Social structure of the Great Terror victims (1937-1938) in the Karelian ASSR’, Journal of Education and Science ‘Istoriya’, №8 (41), 2015.
‘Towards an appraisal of the information potential of the “Memorial Books” as compared to the investigation dossiers of the “Great Terror” victims’, History magazine: researches, № 2, 2014.
‘Social structure of the Great Terror victims (1937-1938) in the Karelian ASSR’, Perm university herald. History, 2014, №3.
‘Social portrait of the Great Terror victims in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic: analysis of database created on the basis of regional “Books of memory”’, in Sorokin A., Kobak A., Kuvaldina O., eds., Living in Terror: Social Aspects of repression. Moscow, Rosspen, 2013.
‘Social portrait of the Great Terror victims (1937-1938): analysis of database created on the material of Nizhny Novgorod region “Books of memory”’, Historical Information Science, №1, September 2012.
Area Studies
University of Nottingham
2022 Cohort, 1+3
https://www.linkedin.com/in/liudmila-lyagushkina
Supervisory Team
Nick Baron
Sarah Badcock