Kristy Ironside

Kristy Ironside is a historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. She is especially interested in the political, economic, and social history of Russia and the USSR’s twentieth century. Her first book, A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union, was published with Harvard University Press in 2021. This book looks at how money, an ideologically problematic "vestige of capitalism," was mobilized by the Soviet government in the intertwined projects of recovering from the Second World War’s damage and building a prosperous communist society. Her articles have appeared in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Slavic Review, and Europe-Asia Studies, among others. She frequently provides media commentary on contemporary developments in the Russian economy and society. Ironside is in the early stages of three new book projects. The first looks at Russia and the USSR’s fraught relationship to international copyright protections from capitalism to communism and back to capitalism again. The second is a microhistory of the life and work of Helen Black, the Soviet Union’s registered foreign agent in America responsible for the official distribution of photographs, music, and literature there 1931-1951, looking more broadly at the business of Soviet propaganda under Stalin. Finally, she is writing a book on Russia’s economic transformation from the late Soviet period to the present through the lens of the multinational fast food chain McDonald’s entry and exit from its market.

Ironside is open to working with graduate students on projects exploring Soviet and Eastern European social, political, and economic history, as well as international history.