Skorobogatov, Yana

Office Hours

Fall 2026: By appointment only.

Education

PhD - University of California, Berkeley 2018
MA - University of Texas, Austin 2012
BA - University of California, Berkeley 2009

Interests and Research

Professor Yana Skorobogatov is a social historian of Russia and the Soviet Union whose research focuses on the late and post-Soviet periods. Her first book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, July 2026) (in progress), a history of the death penalty and the movement to abolish it in Russia and the Soviet Union, uses the records of more than 100 death penalty cases tried during the post-Stalin period to explore changing popular perceptions of the late Soviet state from Joseph Stalin’s death to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Additional research interests include political-economic history, environmental history, and the history and legacies of Russian and Soviet imperialism. She is in the early stages of writing a second book that centers on the Russian island of Sakhalin and its emergence as a major epicenter of global oil after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Publications

Books

• Soon to be published:
  Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, July 2026)
   

Peer Reviewed Manuscripts

• “Angela Davis in the U.S.S.R., 1970-1972,” The American Historical Review (forthcoming July 2027)
• “‘We’ll Pretend to Work, and You’ll Pretend to Pay Us’: Making Time for Rest, Repose, and Recreation on the Job in the Late Soviet Union,” Radical History Review 2026, no. 154 (January 2026)
• “‘Where the Sun Begins its Path Over our Soil’: El’dar Riazanov’s Documentary Sakhalin Island,” in Valerie Kivelson, Sergei Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger, eds, Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Co-authored with Jeffrey Hardy, “‘We Can’t Shoot Everyone’: Supreme Soviet Discussions of Death Row Pardons, 1954-1964,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 59, April 2019, 473-498
  

Book Reviews

• H-Diplo Jervis Forum Roundtable Review of Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (forthcoming 2026)
• Review of Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman, by Susan Schattenberg, trans. John Heath (I.B. Tauris, 2021), Russian Review 84, no. 1 (2025): 153-154
• “Decision Paralysis,” Featured Review of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, by Vladislav M. Zubok (Yale University Press, 2021), Russian Review 82, no. 3 (2023): 516-518
  
  

Awards

• George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service O’Donnell Research Grant Program (2025)
• Columbia University Harriman Institute PepsiCo Grant (2025)
• Columbia University Harriman Institute Publication Grant (2023)
• National Council for Eurasian and Eastern European Research (NCEEER) National Research Grant (2021)
• Williams College Class of 1945 Faculty World Fellowship (2020)
• American Councils Academic Fellowship in Russia (Carnegie Foundation) (declined) (2018)
• The Reginald Zelnik Memorial Endowment Fund Fellowship (2018)
• University of California at Berkeley Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (2017)
• NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russian Writer in Residence Fellowship (2017)
• Association for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Dissertation Research Grant (2016)

Courses

• Literature Humanities I (Columbia Core)
• Literature Humanities II (Columbia Core)
• History 2215: Modern Russia, 1800 - Present
• History 3274: Collapse - The Fall and Afterlife of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev to Putin
• History 4389 - Stalinism
• History 8397: New Directions in Eastern European and Eurasian History [co-taught with Malgorzata Mazurek]

Affiliations

• American Historical Association
• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies