Biography
Anna Whittington is a historian of citizenship and inequality in Soviet Eurasia. Her in-progress book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, explores the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse. Drawing on sources collected in more than 30 archives and libraries in nine countries, the book demonstrates that Soviet leaders promoted a civic identity built on active participation in public life. People embraced this vision of equal citizenship across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum, even as ethno-linguistic, racial, gender, and spatial differences created disparities in their claims to this identity. As the book shows, the Soviet rhetoric of equality, inclusion, and multiethnic representation coexisted with systemic inequalities that shaped lived experiences. Inclusion and inequality were both fundamental to the articulation and experience of Soviet citizenship. Professor Whittington has also begun research on a second project, tentatively titled A Mirror for Society: Censuses in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, which explores the history of enumeration.
Education
History, Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Russian, East European and Eurasian Center
Recent Publications
Whittington, A. (2024). An Anxious Unraveling: Perestroika and the Fracturing of the Soviet People. Kritika, 25(3), 513–545. https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2024.a937900
Whittington, A. (2023). Contested Privilege: Ethnic Russians and the Unmaking of the Soviet Union. The Journal of modern history, 95(4), 887-927. https://doi.org/10.1086/727478
Whittington, A. (2019). ‘Citizen of the Soviet Union – it sounds dignified.’. In M. Van Ginderachter, & J. Fox (Eds.), National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe (pp. 225-247). (Routledge Studies in Modern European History). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315145402-12
Whittington, A. (2019). Making a Home for the Soviet People: World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod. In K. A. Goff, & L. H. Siegelbaum (Eds.), Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (pp. 147-161). Cornell University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvdtph5w.15
