Anna Whittington is a historian of citizenship and inequality in Soviet Eurasia. Her in-progress book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, traces the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse, drawing on multilingual legal documents, citizen letters, educational curricula, oral histories, and newspapers. The book demonstrates that leaders promoted a Soviet identity that transcended ethnicity and emphasized citizens’ active involvement in the state beginning shortly after the revolution. People across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum embraced this identity as they identified as citizens, even as various disparities affected claims to and participation in citizenship. The negotiation of equality and inequality featured at the core of Soviet citizenship. Despite an official emphasis on equality, citizens encountered myriad inequalities in their everyday lives, the result of both explicitly discriminatory practices and more subtle grades of privilege that distinguished citizens from one another by race, ethnicity, language, gender, and class.
Professor Whittington has also begun research on two additional projects. The first, tentatively titled A Mirror for Society: Censuses in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, explores the history of enumeration, while the second, Cacophony: The Unmaking of the Soviet Union, considers the Soviet collapse from the grassroots level. Her work draws on multilingual archival research conducted in more than 30 archives and libraries in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, and on extensive experience traveling and working across the former Soviet Union.
Prior to returning to the University of Michigan, Dr. Whittington held postdoctoral fellowships at the now-shuttered Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2018–19), the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2019–21), the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2021–22), and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2021–22), and worked as an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2022–25).
