Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History provide timely, concise, authoritative and distinctive overviews of the post-Soviet space. By providing parallel histories of the fifteen successor states, interspersed with thematic studies, the series will explore both the diversity of these histories and the threads that hold them together, acknowledging both a common past and a variety of trajectories. The series strikes a balance between country studies of each of the fifteen successor states, and thematic studies covering the entire post-Soviet space. Regularly updated and conceived from the start for a digital environment, the series will provide a dynamic reference resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in history, art history, cultural studies, political science, and Eurasian studies. The volumes will also be valuable for wider general audiences, including international relations practitioners, culture influencers, business people engaged in the region, journalists, politicians and anybody interested in the post-Soviet space.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He is the inaugural Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches the histories of the Soviet Union, of Stalinism, and of dictatorship and democracy more generally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), Stalin’s Defectors (2017), The Soviet Union: A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (2020), The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century (with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant, 2020), Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (2021) and  Russia’s War against Ukraine: The Whole Story (2023). He has written for The Age, The Conversation, The Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, and is a frequent guest on both radio and television programs of Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC.

Rebecca Friedman is Founding Director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab and Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is an expert in the cultural and gender history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union and is author of the first English-language monograph on Russian masculinity, Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863 (2006) as well as the first English-language co-edited volume on the subject (with Barbara Clements and Dan Healy) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. She has also published on the subjects of Russian childhood and the gendering of the Cadet Corps. Her recent book, Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality: Time at Home, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores modern time and home in twentieth century Russia (2020). Much of her work at present involves public humanities and community-engaged scholarship, including multi-million dollar Mellon Foundation funded projects.