Dr Lara Douds

Lara is an Assistant Professor in History, having joined Northumbria in 2019 as Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History. She previously taught at the Universities of Leeds, York and Durham. 

She is a specialist in the history of government, political practice and political culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. Her research explores continuity across the revolutionary divide of 1917, specifically the Soviet government’s inheritance, in structures, culture and practice, from the Tsarist past and how this legacy interacted with revolutionary ideology and circumstance. 

Her first monograph Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State was published by Bloomsbury in February 2018. This book is the first English-language, archive-based study to examine the practical functioning and internal culture of the early Soviet cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars, to explore its period as a coalition government, and to elucidate the process by which governmental decision-making authority migrated from ‘state’ to supreme Communist Party bodies during the early years of Soviet power, in part due to the dysfunction generated by experimental ‘democratizing’ features introduced by Soviet state-builders. 

Lara is co-editor, alongside Professor James Harris (Leeds) and Dr Peter Whitewood (York St John), of The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and contributed a chapter ‘Lenin’s Living Link? Petitioning the Ruler in Russia across the revolutionary divide’ to this volume. 

She is currently working on a project entitled ‘Petitioning the Soviet President: Mikhail Kalinin's Reception Office, 1919-1946' which explores the widespread and sustained practice of subjects and citizens writing individual letters of request and complaint to leaders and considers how these petitions were handled by those in power. The project aims to show how this form of petitioning served as a crucial interface between government and governed which can help to illuminate the nature of persistent authoritarian rule across centuries of Russian history.