Research

My dissertation studies the integration of post-Soviet scholars into U.S. academia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I treat this event as an exogenous shock, analyzing how migrant scholars navigate expectations of American academia and how disciplines reconfigure their social orders in response. 

Rethinking the Concept of Agency: A Case Study on Chicagoans Who Faced Mental Health Crisis Response Institutions (Chicago Ethnography Conference, 2024)

My personal interest in this collaborative project led to my presentation at the Chicago Ethnography Conference (2024). In this work, I approached the concept of agency through the lens of dehumanization studies, such as Disability Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Mad Studies, that dissect the mechanism of marginalizing subhuman “others” like savages, slaves, criminals, or the insane. Drawing on interviews with Chicagoans who went through a mental health crisis and faced crisis response institutions, the study explores factors that influence both the surrender of agency through compliance with external deprivation and the defense of one’s agency when confronted with attempts to restrict it. Findings show the complicated combination of identity elements that shape one's agency level such as race, gender, sexual orientation, financial (in)security, family or parenting status, immigrant status, cultural identity, or criminal records. Intersections between these categories and a sense of their empowerment become the basis for struggle or compliance in various social situations. Overall, the study reveals agency as a capacity to exercise control over one’s actions and decisions, which is unevenly distributed among individuals due to structural inequality and can be taken away because of power dynamics in different social interactions. This approach creates the interactional model of agency that allows making visible individuals’ agency mechanisms in the moment of its deprivation or denial in relationships with powerholders. Overall, the article demonstrates the effectiveness of this new methodological approach in analyzing agency fluctuations within the social interactions of any marginalized groups (such as migrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, or racialized communities), particularly in Public Sociology research.

In addition to my academic career, I worked in the International Historical Educational Charitable and Human Rights Society, "International Memorial," which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. During this time, I conducted research using Memorial's archival documents focused on political repression in the Soviet Union. This long-term collaborative work culminated in the release of a digital archival database containing information on more than 100,000 individuals, detailing the history of their political repression. 

What distinguished our project was its innovative approach to archiving. Instead of simply digitizing documents, we created a searchable database that reconstructed the social networks of repression. Each entry not only recorded the individual’s case but also marked their connections to others – whether as co-defendants in a trial, fellow inmates in a camp, or members of the same underground group. This method allowed researchers to trace patterns of repression and solidarity across cases, offering a structural view of political persecution that conventional archives rarely make accessible. By manually processing and encoding the data, we ensured that the database could be searched by key variables such as name, year, or place of residence, and much more – retrievals that would otherwise take weeks or months in a traditional archive can now be completed in seconds.

The Ways of Manifestation of Agency in Investigative Cases of Gulag Prisoners (Hans Koschnick Scholarship for Researchers at Risk in the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany, 2022)

During this fellowship, I pursued a project on the ways Gulag prisoners manifested their agency in their investigation files, drawing on documents I worked with in International Memorial’s archives. The investigation files, produced under criminal-political accusations, usually followed a strictly standardized structure, recording every stage of the criminal case and subsequent repression (execution or camp sentence). Normally, the accused themselves were excluded from filling in these documents, and investigators often falsified interrogation protocols with fabricated confessions. Nevertheless, some prisoners found ways to inscribe their agency into their files and register their resistance.

First, some refused to sign interrogation protocols, or, conversely, signed but added clarifying notes or protests alongside their signatures. Second, prisoners sometimes wrote petitions to Stalin or other Soviet leaders, asking them to review their cases and overturn false accusations. These petitions often contained reflections on how the prisoners understood political order and justice. Third, and perhaps most striking, are irregular and unsanctioned reports by the officers that reveal moments when prisoners refused to comply with demands, openly resisted interrogators, or insulted Soviet authority and regime.

Taken together, these practices show that Gulag prisoners did not remain entirely silent objects of repression, but instead seized narrow, risky opportunities to assert themselves in a system designed to strip them of voice. Theoretically, the project contributes to the study of agency under authoritarian conditions by demonstrating that even highly regulated bureaucratic forms can be appropriated to register dissent and self-assertion. More broadly, this research highlights the importance of reading “against the grain” of institutional archives, showing how what appears as uniform state documentation can in fact reveal fragmented, but vital, traces of resistance and alternative understandings of justice.

The project Institutions and Networks in Soviet Literature was focused on studying the interplay between social networks and institutional structures in the late Soviet literary field (1960s–1980s). While postwar Soviet society is often described as “networked,” existing scholarship has focused primarily on practices of blat and patron-client relations in politics and economics. By contrast, the role of networks in the production and circulation of Soviet literature, both censored and uncensored, remains understudied. This project sought to address this gap by exploring how literary networks operated alongside, and in tension with, institutional arrangements such as publishing houses and censorship bodies.

The two-year collaboration on this research project resulted in two co-authored publications in New Literary Observer in 2022:

• Kukulin, Ilya, Maiofis, Maria, and Chetverikova, Mariia. 2022. “Backstage Improvisations: Social Cooperation, Circumvention of the Rules and Processes of Cultural Production in the Late USSR. Article One.” New Literary Observer 2(174). 

• Kukulin, Ilya, Maiofis, Maria, and Chetverikova, Mariia. 2022. “Backstage Improvisations: Social Cooperation, Circumvention of the Rules and Processes of Cultural Production in the Late USSR. Article Two.” New Literary Observer 3(175).

Backstage Improvisations: Social Cooperation, Circumvention of the Rules and Processes of Cultural Production in the Late USSR

This research project examines the “unwritten rules” of late-Soviet literary publishing (1950s–1980s) through the lens of "backstage" communication — informal episodes in which writers, editors, and critics privately discussed the functioning of the Soviet literary field and its institutions, as well as the possibility of circumventing or adapting these norms. Drawing on biographical interviews with literary actors and contemporaneous egodocuments, the study reconstructs the paradoxical status of the backstage: while it was a central element of Soviet literary life, it has since been systematically forgotten or downplayed in retrospective accounts. Informants often describe it as if “everyone understood everything,” minimizing the role of explicit negotiation. Yet archival and oral evidence show that these hidden communicative practices structured the field as decisively as formal institutions.

The findings show that the backstage served a dual role. On the one hand, it operated as an enabling mechanism, allowing negotiation, flexibility, and limited innovation in a system where official publishing was tightly bound by ideological and institutional filters. On the other hand, it reinforced hierarchies and secrecy, reproducing complicity within the literary establishment. In this sense, the backstage not only governed how texts entered circulation but also defined the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the literary community.

The implications of this work extend beyond Soviet literary history. More broadly, it shows that in contexts where institutions impose rigid constraints, informal networks and hidden communicative spaces become decisive arenas for adaptation and agency. The systematic forgetting of the backstage, coupled with the persistence of myths about “universal understanding,” reveals how authoritarian cultural systems both depend on and conceal their own informal infrastructures. As such, this study contributes to a sociology of institutions, showing how authoritarian regimes generate shadow logics of organization that not only sustain cultural production in the moment but also shape the memory and historiography of these practices long after the collapse of formal structures.