I have mostly worked on Soviet history, with a focus on the period from the October Revolution to the end of the Second World War. My broader interests lie in the way that revolutionary change and armed conflict affect the subsequent development of political institutions in terms of things like policy priorities, social composition, cultural norms and so on. I have pursued two projects in that general direction. The first, my doctoral research project, was a study of the role of the Bolshevik rank-and-file in Soviet governance in the period 1921-1941. This is also the subject of my first book. My research as an ESMC fellow examined the political officer hierarchy (commissars) of the Soviet armed forces as an element of the nexus of civil-military relations in the USSR. I am currently developing a new project on the comparative history of the aftermath of civil war in Europe.
Below are some of my research outputs organised by project on the basis of relevance, rather than date. I have also included some publications that do not neatly fit into either project, labeling them ‘other’ for lack of a better term.
Rank and File Communists
Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921-1941, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
‘Bolshevik bargaining in Soviet industry: communists between state and society in the interwar USSR’, The Journal of Modern History, 2021 [preprint].
‘”Merciless War” against trifles: the Leningrad Party Organisation after the fall of the Zinoviev Opposition’, Revolutionary Russia 28, no. 1, 2015: 48–68.
Commissars and the Military
‘Building a Red Navy: communist activism and military authority in the Baltic Fleet, 1918–1940’, Contemporary European History, 2022 [preprint].
‘Proletarian Internationalism as Revolutionary Patriotism: Political instruction in the Baltic Fleet, 1926-1941’, in Steven Parfitt et al (eds.) Workers of all lands unite? Working Class Nationalism and Internationalism before 1945 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017): 25–46.
Civil War and its Consequences
‘Shattered States: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Aftermath of Civil War in Russia and Greece’, Journal of Modern European History, 2022 [preprint].
Other
‘The Communist Party and the Late 1930s Democracy Campaigns: Origins and Outcomes’ in Lara Douds, James Harris and Peter Whitewood (eds.), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-1941 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020): 77–92.
«Από την κοινωνική ιστορία στον εμπειρικό κατακερματισμό: η ιστοριογραφία της Ρωσικής Επανάστασης στη μετασοβιετική εποχή» [From social history to empirical fragmentation: Russian Revolution historiography in the post-Soviet era], Ta Istorika 66, Nov. 2017: 35–55 [In Greek].
Yiannis Kokosalakis 