People

Lara Douds

Lara Douds is a specialist in the history of state building, political practice, and political culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. Her current research explores continuity across the revolutionary divide of 1917, specifically the Soviet government’s inheritance, in structures, culture and practice, from the Tsarist past and how this legacy interacted with revolutionary ideology and circumstance.

Her first monograph Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State was be published by Bloomsbury in February 2018. 

Lara is co-editor, alongside Professor James Harris (Leeds) and Dr Peter Whitewood (York St John), of the volume The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41 and has contributed a chapter ‘Lenin’s Living Link? Petitioning the Ruler in Russia across the revolutionary divide’ to the collection.

She is currently working on a new project ‘Petitioning the Sovereign in Russia from Paul I to Putin’ which explores how the widespread and sustained practice of petitioning served as a crucial interface between government and governed, illuminating the multi-dimensional nature of persistent authoritarian rule across centuries of Russian history.