Samantha Ann Lomb

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia, where I have been teaching since 2012. I completed my PhD in History at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. My research focuses on the Stalinist 1930’s. I am currently conducting research on two interrelated projects. The first is research for a future book manuscript on daily life on the collective farms and the day-to-day relationships between collective farmers and local officials. English-language studies of collective farms in the USSR focus overwhelmingly on the initial campaign to collectivize agriculture rather than how collective farms actually functioned and the extent to which collective farmers were able to influence a variety of policies and practices. The second is an article-length study of how collective farmers used expulsion from the collective farm as a way for those farms to regulate members’ behavior, how this practice conflicted with central state and party goals, and how such practices revealed the limits of central control and the power of local residents. Both of my current research projects, like the article noted above, utilize a micro-historical approach, like that of Carlo Ginzburg, to examine the ways in which the lived experience of people often clashed with the political and cultural mandates of officials, and the focus of scholars on national mandates rather than local experiences and worldviews.

My first publication, “Personal and Political: A Microhistory of the “Red Column” Collective Farm, 1935-36,” was published in January 2016 in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies.  In addition to this monograph, my book  Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution was published in November 2017 by Routledge press.  The book uses a regional focus to examine the discourse between the central state leadership and citizens about the new Soviet social contract, the 1936 Soviet Constitution.

Education

PhD. University of Pittsburgh, 2014

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Russian History, Soviet History, Russian Law, Collectivization, Micro-history, Peasant Studies, Stalinism

Websites

• Homepage

• New Books Network Interview

Books

Articles