Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Davis Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her book manuscript “Soviet Informers to the Political Police: Agent Work as Practice and Experience, 1934-1965” examines the social and institutional history of political police informing under Stalin and Khrushchev. On the basis of files from the archives of Ukraine (State Security Service archive), Lithuania (Special Archive), Latvia (National Archive), Estonia (National Archive), Moldavia (National Archive), Georgia (National Archive), and Germany (Stasi Archive), it argues that 1) a mass informer network was an inherent part of the Soviet system of political policing and that informers; 2) high turnover and the mass nature of the network allowed it to function not only as a mechanism of surveillance, but also one of filtration of allegedly anti-Soviet elements; 3) recruitment was a process of uneven negotiation, where informers considered the downsides and set conditions for their willing cooperation.
Sophia is a past winner of the U.S. Fulbright grant, the U.S. Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research grant, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant, the ASEEES Cohen-Tucker grant, and the Harvard Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the Harvard merit term-time grant, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Travel Fellowship, as well as Harvard Davis Center and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute summer research grants.
