I grew up in Krasnodar, a city in the South of Russia. I moved to Moscow when I was 16 to pursue my studies at the History department of the Moscow State University. After simultaneously graduating from the MSU and Collège Universitaire Français de Moscou in 2011 (and falling in love with French sociology), I moved to Paris. There I did an intersdisciplinary Master program in social sciences at École normale supérieure (rue d’Ulm).

From 2014 to 2019, I worked on my doctoral dissertation at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. I defended it at the University of Amsterdam in September 2019. My dissertation explored continuity and change in the Russian and Soviet penal practices from 1879 to 1953, with a particular focus on the emergence of labour camps. A book resulting from it, Coerced Labour, Forced Displacement, and the Soviet Gulag, 1880s-1930s was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024 and is now also available in paperback.

Between February 2020 and January 2026, I was involved in the ERC-funded project ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century, based at the Central European University. As a postdoctoral researcher within this project, I explored the world of women labour activists in Poland and internationally. The major outcome of the project, an innovative collaborative monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A new transnational history, was published in 2025 by UCL Press and is available in open access. I was also fully responsible for the coordination and creation of the project’s public history website, Women’s Labour Activism, including curating and creating the entirety of its content.

I investigate social history of Russia and Eastern Europe through the lens of global labour history, with a particular focus on labour coercion and (im)mobility.