Team
Prof. Dr. Robert Kindler
Robert Kindler is a professor of East European history at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a dissertation on the history of Stalinism and the disastrous famine in Kazakhstan in the early 1930s. His award-winning book on this topic, Stalins Nomaden (Stalin’s Nomads) has been translated into English, Russian, and Kazakh. His second book, Robbenreich (The Empire of Seals), deals with transnational resource conflicts in the North Pacific. He is currently working on a monograph looking at the history of Kazakhstan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which will appear in 2025.
Visit his full German profile here.
Ruslana Bovhyria
Ruslana Bovhyria is a research associate and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include the economic and administrative history of Russian imperial rule in its Eastern borderlands, with a focus on Central Asia. Her current doctoral project, tentatively titled “Imperial Economies. Contested Power, Commerce and Private Trade Companies in Central Asia, 1855-1925”, examines Russian colonial practices in the Transcaspian region. Using the case study of commercial shipping on the Caspian and Aral Seas, the project looks closely at the intricate dependencies between issues of imperial expansion, economic competition and infrastructural modernity.
Visit her full German profile here.
Aksana Döge
Aksana Döge runs the Chair‘s secretariat and is eager to help with administrative problems and travel reimbursements.
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Nikolay Erofeev
kerofeev [at] gmail.com
Nikolay Erofeev is a historian who looks at socialist urban development, with a specific interest in mass housing and socialist development assistance to the Global South. He received his D.Phil (PhD) in History from the University of Oxford in 2020 and a Specialist degree in the History of Art from Moscow State University in 2014. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kassel, the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Basel, and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. His research has been supported by prestigious scholarships, including the Hill Foundation Scholarship (UK), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (Switzerland).
Visit his full German profile here.
Natasha Klimenko
Natasha Klimenko is an editor, researcher, and writer living in Berlin. Currently, she’s a doctoral fellow at the Global Intellectual History Graduate School at the Freie Universität Berlin, and her first supervisor is Prof. Dr. Robert Kindler at the Institute for East European Studies. Her research looks at the history of concepts, artistic practices and networks, and cultural exchanges in Central Asia, the Soviet Union, and Europe in the twentieth century. She also copyedits academic and nonfiction texts, and writes about art, media, and culture.
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Aleksandr Korobeinikov
aleksandr.korobeinikov@fu-berlin.de
Aleksandr Korobeinikov is a research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a doctoral student in the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He has authored multiple articles delving into the history of Sakha intellectuals and their role in shaping the political landscape during the post-imperial transformations of the Yakut (Sakha) region. His current doctoral research project focuses on the different logics of socio-economic imaginations and the role of natural resources in the late imperial, post-imperial, and early Soviet Sakha region.
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Martin Wagner
Martin Wagner is a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin and a review editor at H-Soz-Kult. He studied history and China studies in Berlin, Beijing, and Moscow, and was a guest researcher at Princeton University and in Hong Kong. Martin holds a PhD in History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His first monograph, Collective Disciplining,is an entangled comparison of post-totalitarian transformation in the Soviet Union and China. Currently, he is completing a second monograph (co-authored with Sören Urbansky), China und Russland (China and Russia), which considers four hundred years of Sino-Russian relations. His articles have appeared in The American Historical Review and Historische Zeitschrift, among other publications.
Visit his full German profile here.
Aleksandr Zaslavskii
SHK-Geschichte@oei.fu-berlin.de
Aleksandr Zaslavskii is a student assistant helping with technical issues and guest presentations.
Visit his full German profile here.
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
MONOGRAPH
N. Erofeev, Experiments in Concrete: Manufacturing Soviet Mass Housing, 1955–1991 (In preparation)
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
N. Erofeev, ‘Copper Mining, Development and Urban Planning in Socialist Mongolia.’ Urban History (accepted, forthcoming 2025)
N. Erofeev, ‘Complementary Assistance: Exchanges Between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, China, and Poland during the Cold War.’ Cold War History 24/3 (2024), 453–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2024.2328702
N. Erofeev, ‘Late-Soviet Collective Housing: Self-Help Construction and Self-Management in Youth Residential Complex Housing Movement.’ Journal of Urban History (2024) https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231226327
N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia.’ ABE Journal 19 (2021) https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.12604
N. Erofeev ‘The I-464 Housing Delivery System: A Tool for Urban Modernisation in the Socialist World and Beyond.’ Fabrications 29/2 (2019), 207-230. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2019.1611255
N. Erofeev and M. Sapunova, ‘Urban Standard and Norm and Their (Post)-Socialist Transformation.’ Urban Studies and Practices 3/4 (2018), 7-11. https://doi.org/10.17323/usp3420187-11
BOOK CHAPTERS
N. Erofeev, ‘Socialist Offshore Company-Towns: Extractive Urbanism in Erdenet, Mongolia.’ In Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes (eds.), Telluric Transformations: Art and Extractivism in the Socialist Anthropocene (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, forthcoming)
N. Erofeev, ‘Enabling Imperial Expansion: Prefabricated Housing in the Arctic Region.’ In Markus Lähteenmäki and Da Hyung Jeong (eds.), Off-Center: Architectures of Russian and Soviet Imperialism (Leuven University Press,forthcoming)
N. Erofeev, ‘“Camus est petit, Rozanov est grand”: Soviet housing production and technological transfer from France.’ In Natalia Solopova (ed.), Panel Master: the Raymond Camus Story (DOM Publishers, forthcoming)
N. Erofeev, ‘Building Spaces of Internationalism: Socialist Assistance to Mongolia in 1950-70s.’ In P. Betts, M. Colla (eds.), Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century, St Antony's Series (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), 159–83.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54581-8_7
N. Erofeev, ‘Shabashniki.’ In Alena Ledeneva (ed.), The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3: A Hitchhikers Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in Human Life (UCL Press, 2024), 325-29. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800086142
N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Concerns of Comecon’s Technical Assistance to Mongolia During the Cold War.’ In C. Bernhardt, A. Butter, and M. Motylinska (eds.), Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints, (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 43-72. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110658491-003
REVIEWS
N. Erofeev, ‘Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room. Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991, by Kateryna Malaia.’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (forthcoming)
N. Erofeev, ‘Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital, by Katherine Zubovich.’ Social History, 46/3 (2021), 336-338.https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2021.1927403
NON-PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
N. Erofeev, ‘Kira Kartasheva, Architect, Urban Sociologist, Teacher.’ Second World, Second Sex: Women in Architecture under Socialism (10.10.2022) https://womenbuildingsocialism.org/kira-kartasheva/
N. Erofeev and Michał Murawski, ‘Political Aesthetics of Russian Urbanism.’ Sygma (26.06.2022), https://syg.ma/@sygma/poliestietika-rossiiskogho-urbanizma
N. Erofeev, ‘Cybernetics and Standardization: Revisiting a Soviet Vision for Better Urbanism.’ Strelka MAG 10/04 (2021).
N. Erofeev, ‘The I-464 Housing Delivery System: Technological Transfers from France to Moscow, from Moscow to Alma-Ata, from Alma-Ata to Havana.’ Project Russia 96 (2021), 239-64.
N. Erofeev, ‘The President of Our Country Is a Real Estate Developer. Interview with Kimberly Zarecor and Vladimir Kulić.’ Urban Studies and Practices 3/4 (2018), 12-17. https://doi.org/10.17323/usp34201812-17
N. Erofeev, ‘Ot Periptera k «Korobke»: Teatry Epokhi Modernizma’ [From peripter to the box: theatres of the modernist era], in A. Stepina and A. Petrova (eds.), Mir – Teatr. Arkhitektura i Stsenografiia v Rossii (Moscow, 2017), 373–75.
N. Erofeev, ‘Tbilisi: Otar Kalandarishvili’s Apartment Buildings’, in Michaela Geboltsberger and Georg Schöllhammer (eds.), The Empire Strikes Back? A Traveling Academy through the Post-Soviet Cityscape (Vienna, 2016), 60–64.