Associate Professor Seth Bernstein (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2013) is a historian of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states. He was previously Assistant Professor of History at Higher School of Economics (Moscow). His most recent book is Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in WWII and the Cold War (Cornell, 2023), a history of the millions of Eastern Europeans who came to Hitler's Europe as forced laborers and who returned to a Soviet Union that treated them as traitors. 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 uses a variety of tools, such as geographical information systems, databases, and neural networks and has been published in Memory Studies, Slavic Review, and Soviet and Post-Soviet Review.
He is currently working in two areas:
A book project examines the lives of Soviet Jews arrested during Stalin's anti-Jewish campaign of 1953 but incarcerated under his successors. Using declassified investigation files from the secret police archive of Ukraine, the episode shows the complications of the transition from Stalinism and considers the implications of using police files to write social biographies.
A digital humanities project that uses machine learning to analyze Soviet secret police archives on a large scale.