• Vita

    Alexey Tikhomirov is an Assistant Professor in East European History at Bielefeld University. Before that, he had two Marie Curie Fellowships at UCL and Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He became familiar with German, British, and Italian academic cultures through extended study and research stays in these countries: he was a Robert Bosch Foundation tutor in Russian history at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and has held several research fellowships, including Volkswagen Foundation (“Original – isn’t it? New Options for the Humanities and Cultural Studies”), positions at the Institute for European History in Mainz and at the German Historical Institute Moscow. He was also a Gerda Henkel Fellow at the University of Tübingen and a Goethe Fellow at the University of Jena as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Studies in Aarhus and Konstanz and the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento. His research interests cover political and social history of Eastern Europe and Russia, including state and nation-building from below, media and communication, trust and distrust, the history of everyday life in Soviet-style societies, and the functioning of Soviet and transnational subjectivities, and cultural history in the broadest sense – from iconoclasm and leader cults to petitions, justice and the legal spaces of participation and belonging in modern dictatorships. His articles have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasia History, the Slavonic and East European Review, and the Journal of Modern European History.

  • Research Project

    Trust in Justice: Petitions to Party and State Leaders in the ‘Long’ Soviet Century

    My research project analyses the role of diverse types of petitions to Soviet leaders in dynamizing law-making and realizing justice during the ‘long’ twentieth century. I argue that petitions to Soviet leaders created a dialectical field of uniformity and a plurality of legal practices and procedures, a dynamic tension between normativity and exceptions to the rule which created an environment where historical change was possible—or could be blocked. After the 1917 revolution, there were no dramatic breaks in (post-)Soviet history. Providing evidence of strong lines of continuity in the interactions between the state, society, and the individual enables me to conceptualize the Soviet experience as the ‘long’ twentieth century, stretching from Lenin to Putin. The history of Russian statehood emerges from this vantage point, a history which continues to shape politics and society today.

    Because they had the power to grant pardons, Soviet leaders were seen as an empathic institution for administering justice. As a result, petitions to leaders helped produce the communist state’s legitimacy by opening a legal space for establishing a new normativity and new bureaucratic procedures. At the same time, however, petitions made exceptions to the rules and held out the possibility of a direct response to the needs and feelings of a single individual. In taking account of contemporary social-scientific, legal, medical, and criminological expert knowledge, along with state-supported practices of censorship and surveillance, I reflect on how bureaucratic empathy—or indifference—was produced as part of the communication process linking (or failing to connect) the writer and the addressee. More specifically, I illuminate the significance of psychiatrists, KGB officials, and journalists in the dynamics of judicial debates and the making of a legal normativity that impacted the in/visibility of written appeals to party and state leaders.

  • Selected Publications

    Tikhomirov, Alexey: Practices of Humiliation, Rites of Violence, and Emotional Memory in Modern State- and Nation-Building. The Forced Removal of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945, in: The Journal of Modern History 96/2 (2024), 362–401.

    Tikhomirov, Alexey: The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 1945–1961. Lanham (hardback) 2022, (paperback) 2023.

    Postoutenko, K./ Tikhomirov, Alexey/ Zakharine, D. (Ed.): Media and Communication in the Soviet Union (1917–1953). General Perspectives, London 2022.

    Tikhomirov, Alexey (Ed.): Trust and Distrust under State Socialism, 1953–1991. A Special Issue, in: Journal of Modern European History 15/3 (2017). 

    Tikhomirov, Alexey: The State as a Family. Speaking Kinship, Being Soviet and Reinventing Tradition in the USSR, in: Journal of Modern European History 15/3 (2017), 395–418.

    Tikhomirov, Alexey: The Regime of Forced Trust: Making and Breaking of Emotional Bonds Between People and State in Soviet Russia, 1917–1941, in: Slavonic and East European Review, Special Issue “Trust and Distrust in the USSR” 91/1 (2013), 78–118.

    Tikhomirov, Alexey/ Friedlander, Jacqueline: Symbols of Power in Rituals of Violence. The Personality Cult and Iconoclasm on the Soviet Empire’s Periphery (East Germany, 1945–61), in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13/1 (2012), 47–88.