Kristy Ironside
Ph.D. in History, University of Chicago
Russian and Soviet history, History of Communism, Socialist Political Economy, the Welfare State, the USSR and Russia in the world
Kristy Ironside is a historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. She is especially interested in the political, economic, and social history of Russia and the USSR鈥檚 twentieth century. Her first book, A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union, was published with Harvard University Press in 2021. This book looks at how money, an ideologically problematic "vestige of capitalism," was mobilized by the Soviet government in the intertwined projects of recovering from the Second World War鈥檚 damage and building a prosperous communist society. Her articles have appeared in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Slavic Review, and Europe-Asia Studies, among others. She frequently provides media commentary on contemporary developments in the Russian economy and society. Ironside is in the early stages of three new book projects. The first looks at Russia and the USSR鈥檚 fraught relationship to international copyright protections from capitalism to communism and back to capitalism again. The second is a microhistory of the life and work of Helen Black, the Soviet Union鈥檚 registered foreign agent in America responsible for the official distribution of photographs, music, and literature there 1931-1951, looking more broadly at the business of Soviet propaganda under Stalin. Finally, she is writing a book on Russia鈥檚 economic transformation from the late Soviet period to the present through the lens of the multinational fast food chain McDonald鈥檚 entry and exit from its market.
Ironside is open to working with graduate students on projects exploring Soviet and Eastern European social, political, and economic history, as well as international history.