is Professor of Russian at New College, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely on Russian literature and cultural history, including Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (Granta Books, London, 2005/Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2009) and Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (Yale University Press, 2007). She is currently working on a study of Leningrad and St Petersburg since 1957.
The “open society” to which Soviet existence is often claimed to have been opposed resembles the old idea of “the free world”. A non-moralistic approach to group relations in the Soviet Union moves beyond the simplistic link between modernisation and openness, writes Catriona Kelly.
