Elena joined the University of Manchester as a Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow in November 2025.
Together with our project, Elena is carrying out research on a related topic: 'War Without Peace: Analysing Russian Civil Militarization Propaganda and Hybrid Warfare in Former Soviet States', focusing on Moldova, Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Before joining the University of Manchester, Elena was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She contributes to the ERC CrimGov project, exploring the role of criminal governance in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Elena finished her DPhil project in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2022. Her thesis was focused on the legacies of wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya for contemporary Russian society as well as the militarisation and patriotic mobilisation of Russia.
Previously, Elena worked as a special correspondent for independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, covering different political and social issues in the former Soviet countries. She was a Fellow of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2015-2016) in Washington, DC and published a book 'Article 58. Unseized. Stories of GULAG Survivors and Perpetrators' (2016), translated into four languages. She holds an MA in History from The University of Manchester and an MA in Journalism from The Moscow State University.