Francesca Silano is Assistant Professor of History and a scholar of late-Imperial and Soviet Russian History. She is a specialist of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early years of the Bolshevik regime and examines the legal, cultural and religious impacts of the upheaval of revolution and civil war on lay believers, hierarchs, and the institutions of the Church. She is a research scholar at the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. Her book manuscript, The Battle for Russia’s Souls: Patriarch Tikhon, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet State (1865-1925) is under contract with Cornell University Press.