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Seth Bernstein

Associate Professor

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Email: sethbernstein

Associate Professor Seth Bernstein (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2013) is a historian of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states. He was previously Associate Professor of History at Higher School of Economics (Moscow). In 2017 he published Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism(Cornell University Press; Russian translation ROSSPEN, 2018). He translated Moscow State University Professor Alexander Vatlin’s Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016) and Higher School of Economics Professor Liudmila Novikova’s An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). His digital humanities work in articles and blog posts explores how GIS and historical databases can enrich historical research.

Dr. Bernstein is currently completing a manuscript called “Return to the Motherland: The Repatriation of Soviet Citizens after World War II.” During the Second World War, millions of Soviet-born people came to Hitler’s Europe as forced laborers, prisoners of war or refugees. Over five million returned to the USSR at the end of the war. Treated simultaneously as victims and traitors, returnees’ brutal but transnational experience is a window onto the impact of World War II in the USSR, Soviet conceptions of human rights, and migration in the Cold War.