SSRC Dissertation Development Fellow Anne O'Donnell

A Noah's Ark: Moving to Moscow, Material Life, and Information in Revolutionary Russia, 1916-1924

History, Princeton University

Project Description
This dissertation examines the institutions and experiences of revolution through the prism of one event: the desertion of the Russian Empire's capital, Petrograd, in March 1918, and the installation of the Bolshevik regime in Moscow over the next six years. It undertakes a fine-grained study of the built environment, material culture, and information networks of the Soviet capital to develop a cultural history of material life and state formation in the context of a non-market economy, arguing that the practices created to manage material life shaped not just the operation of that economy, but the implementation, unfolding, and fate of the revolution itself. These practices so deeply marked both personal relationships and institutions that even after the revolution ended, they proved impossible to leave behind.

Bio:
Anne O'Donnell is a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of History, where she studies the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union under the direction of Stephen Kotkin and Katya Pravilova. She was previously a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and received her A.B. from Princeton University and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.