Anne O'Donnell

I am a historian of twentieth- century Russia. My first book, Taking Stock: Power and Possession in Revolutionary Russia, charts the rise of illiberal Soviet statecraft through the conquest of the urban material environment. It is a history of market-making in reverse: of how people have lost their worlds of things; how they have taken things from one another; how they scrambled conventional indicators of value, and how these searingly intimate, yet widely shared experiences coalesced into a staging ground for socialist revolution. My next project will be a study of the study of poverty in the post-war Soviet Union.

Research Associate, Center for History and Economics, Harvard University

“La confiscation des biens personnels en Russie (1917-1923): comment mettre fin légalement à la révolution russe?,” in 1917, un moment révolutionnaire, special issue of Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, edited by Sophie Cœuré and Sabine Dullin, no. 135, juillet-septembre 2017, pp. 117-131. (English title: The confiscation of personal possessions in Russia (1917-1923): the legal closure of the Russian Revolution. Trans. from the English by Françoise Bouillot.)

“Materialnaia zhizn i vlast v Moskve, 1914-1920.” Goroda imperii v gody Velikoi voiny i revoliutsii: sbornik statei, edited by Alexei Miller and Dmitri Chernyi, Nestor-Istoriia, 2017, pp. 19-52. (English title “Material Life and Power in Moscow, 1914-1920,” in Imperial Cities in the Great War and Revolution.)

Popular Press:

“The Bolsheviks versus the Deep State,” The New York Times “Red Century” series at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/opinion/the-bolsheviks-versus-the-deep-state.html March 27, 2017