About this Event
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by Yana Skorobogatov
A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.
From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.
Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.
About the Author
, Harriman Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet History, is a social historian of Russia and the Soviet Union whose research focuses on the late and post-Soviet periods. She is in the early stages of writing a second book that centers on the Russian island of Sakhalin and its emergence as a major epicenter of global oil after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Additional research interests include political-economic history, environmental history, and the history and legacies of Russian and Soviet imperialism.
About the Speakers
is an Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. She is a historian of the Soviet Union, communist Eastern Europe, and the global Cold War. She is currently working on A Global History of Russian: From Soviet World Language to Putin’s “Russian World,” which examines Soviet efforts to promote Russian as a global language during the Cold War and the ways local officials, academics, and ordinary people engaged with, contested, or assimilated Soviet language policies. At Tufts, she teaches courses on Russian and Eastern European history, Global Communism, nationality, race and religion, Stalinism, Soviet foreign policy, World War II and the Holocaust, the Cold War, and Europe in the 1960s.
is a Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of Russia, particularly the imperial period, with interests in Russian thought in European context, environmental and philosophical thought, cultural transmission, material culture and local history, and the history of the Black Sea region and Russian-Ottoman relations. She is the author of The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920 (1997), Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in 19th-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (2011), and Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire, as well as a co-author of A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (2003). She is currently working on Russia in the Age of Elizabeth (1741–61) and This Side of Good & Evil: Vladimir Soloviev for the 21st Century.
is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, and the department chair. His research focuses on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture, and post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs and more than two hundred articles, including Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999) and Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011). He is also a co-author of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024). His 2022 monograph, A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, was co-authored with Ilya Kukulin.
is the Associate Professor of Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University and specializes in the modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her research interests include the history of the social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She is the author of Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (2010) and Socialist Factory: Workers in People’s Poland and in the GDR on the Eve of the Sixties (2005). Her current book project, Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism, 1918–1968, examines the role of Warsaw-based social scientists in shaping debates about population, migration, and capitalism in Eastern Europe and transforming locally produced knowledge into development policies for the so-called “Third World.” She has also written on full employment in interwar Poland, the history of the social sciences, and universities as spaces connecting the Second and Third Worlds during the Cold War.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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