Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet History, University of Miami

Expert Bio

Krista Goff is an assistant professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Miami. She specializes in the North and South Caucasus, nationalism, citizenship, empire, ethnic conflict, and oral history. Her monograph, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus, draws on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow. A study of the politics and practices of managing national minority rights and communities in the Soviet Union, as well as the personal and political consequences of such efforts, Nested Nationalism argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR.

Wilson Center Project

"Deportees and Settlers: Remaking Sites of Deportation after World War Two"

Project Summary

My book foregrounds the post-World War Two politics and practices of suppressing non-titular minority communities in the Soviet Union, and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Soviet nationality policy frequently has been invoked to explain ethnically framed violence surrounding the dissolution of the USSR, but scholars have failed to grapple with the specificities of minority life after the 1930s. This gap has resulted in ahistorical analyses of minority movements across the (former) USSR. I develop three minority community studies--the Talysh, Lezgin, and Georgian-lngilo--and follow them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the politics, cultures, and communities that were layered across internal and international borders. What were the mechanisms of cultural and identity production in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among Talysh and Lezgin activists? And, finally, how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across Eurasia?

Major Publications

Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2020)

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, co-edited with Lewis Siegelbaum, (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Previous Terms

Title VIII Short-Term Scholar, Kennan Institute, October 2020, "Deportees and Settlers: Remaking Sites of Deportation after World War Two."

Title VIII Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, September 2017- August 2018, "Nested Nationalism: Slow Violence and Ethnic Conflict in the (post-) Soviet Caucasus."