This lecture is co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History.
About the Lecture: This lecture will offer an overview of Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, which came out in July 2026 with the University of Chicago Press. From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness. Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Fate in My Hands recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. Skorobogatov offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.
About the Speaker: Yana Skorobogatov is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet history at Columbia University.