Stephen Lovell
Professor of Modern History, King's College London
I am Professor of Modern History at King’s College London. I have written widely on Russian social and cultural history, with particular interests in media and communications, old age and generations, urbanization and urban culture, and voting and political culture in the Russian Empire and the USSR. I am currently researching the history of voting from Catherine the Great to Putin, a project supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004. I am the author of the prize-winning "Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000" (2003) and "Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970" (2015), as well as five other books covering periods from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. I am a former editor of "Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History" and now serve on the editorial board of "Past and Present".
EXPs by Stephen Lovell
Catherine the Great transformed Russia into a modern European empire by combining enlightened absolutism, imperial expansion, and new electoral mechanisms designed to strengthen imperial governance
Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to introduce competitive elections into the Soviet system unleashed nationalism, weakened Communist authority, and accelerated the collapse of the USSR, making him a hero in the West but a deeply controversial figure in Russia.
To understand Russian imperialism today, one must look back across key periods of Russian and Soviet history — from the imperial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the revolutionary legacy of 1917 to the heroic memory of World War II and the consolidation of Soviet great-power identity in the 1970s.