Fourth-year college student majoring in Russian and international relations with a passion for military history. Areas of interest include the social and organizational history of the Soviet military, primarily focusing on the role of the Red Army in World War II. Using previously secret Soviet military documents and recent scholarly analysis, I seek to illuminate the lives of ordinary soldiers, who have previously remained faceless in Western historiography, and reduce uncritical repetition of propaganda by both sides in Eastern Front articles.
Major contributions include:
Featured articles on the
15th Tank Corps and
2nd Red Banner Army, still the only articles on Soviet World War II units to reach featured status
Nikopol–Krivoi Rog offensive and
Odessa Offensive, using Soviet casualty reports to provide more accurate casualty estimates. To date, these recently available reports have not been exploited in secondary literature.
More than 120 biographies of wartime Soviet commanders, including those assessed as failures in command, the repressed, and those rewarded for their performance, drawing on recently digitized performance assessments and personnel records to provide a more objective view. These include some whose biographies reveal the nature of wartime discipline:
Aleksey Vlasenko, a division commander demoted for summarily executing subordinates
Histories of Soviet rifle divisions incorporating archival documents to provide data on ethnicity and demographics of their personnel, such as
257th Rifle Division (November 1941 formation)