Sarah Badcock

I recently completed my book, entitled 'Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History'. This is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. This book is the culmination of several years of work on 1917. This work is based on research in archives in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Nizhnii Novgorod. My work has focused on the regions of Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan, and has concentrated on the experience of revolution for ordinary workers, soldiers and peasants, rather than on the political elite.

My current research project aims to explore experiences of Siberian exile for political prisoners in late Imperial Russia, and society’s attitudes towards political exiles. I am particularly interested in the diversity of experience, of the impact it had in forming identities, and will attempt to focus not on the political elite, but on rank and file political activists, whose stories are often overshadowed. This work will contribute to our understanding of the political mentalite of former exiles, the development of social and political networks in Siberia, and the climate of civil society in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. I spent November 2005 conducting preliminary archival research in Moscow, Vladivostok and Yakutsk. I was the first western scholar to utilise the rich archival holdings of Yakutsk.
I also intend to pursue research on Alexander Kolegaev, the son of political exiles and one of Russia's leading figures in the left Socialist Revolutionary party. Kolegaev was a leading light of the peasants' soviet in Kazan during 1917.

I am reviews editor for the journal Revolutionary Russia.

From January 2007, I will be a member of the National Advisory Board for the journal Europe Asia Studies.