Blog Posts

Introduction In Fall 2025, this project began as a research paper on the motives for defection among former Red Army soldiers during the Early Cold War. My project supervisor, Dr. Seth Bernstein, introduced me to the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System database, which had collected 705 interviews from Soviet emigrés. These interviews became […]

Data points This spreadsheet yields significant quantitative data about the Harvard Project as a whole, but a few visualizations help to highlight certain data points. The visualizations highlight the social history of the respondents, such as their ethnicity, sex, education level, and occupation. If I had more time and more programming skills, I would have […]

Soviet Data Digitization and Contextualization Introduction Starting in August 2025, I began collecting, digitizing, and contextualizing data on Russia and the Soviet Union for the KGB Lab’s website. This blog post serves as a reflection on why I chose to analyze many of the sources, as well as a commentary on the importance of viewing […]

Introduction to the KGB/Soviet Secret Police Q&A Database What does a secret police interrogation sound like, exactly? What are the stories of the interrogated? How are secret police interrogation questions formed – do they follow any particular syntactic constructions? Which questions elicit the longest answers, and which ones the shortest? How does the language of […]