Elena Racheva is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, where she contributed to the CrimGov project, exploring the role of the thieves-in-law criminal fraternity in the history of the Soviet GULAG and its role in criminal governance in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and Georgia. Her current research project focuses on Russian military propaganda in post-Soviet countries, including Georgia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan.
Elena completed her DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2022. Her thesis examined the legacies of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya for contemporary Russian society, as well as the militarisation and patriotic mobilisation of Russia.
Previously, Elena worked as a special correspondent for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, covering political and social issues in former Soviet countries. She was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2015–2016) in Washington, DC, and published the book Article 58. Unseized. Stories of GULAG Survivors and Perpetrators (2016), which has been translated into four languages. She holds an MA in History from The University of Manchester and an MA in Journalism from Moscow State University.
Research interests: Legitimisation and justification of violence, its perpetrators, and its place in the popular consciousness
