Professional Background
Irina Makhalova is an Alfred Landecker Lecturer Program Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where she earned her master’s degree in contemporary European history. She holds a Ph.D. from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where she also served as a senior lecturer in the Department of History from 2018 to 2022. Her doctoral dissertation examined the history of Crimea under Nazi occupation and the subsequent Soviet policies of retribution in the region.
Dr. Makhalova has published several articles on Soviet war crimes trials in academic journals, including the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Cahiers du Monde Russe, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Eastern European Holocaust Studies, and The Journal of Contemporary History.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History-Munich & Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Exchange Scholar Fellow, Irina Makhalova will examine Soviet war crimes trials conducted behind closed doors from the 1940s through the 1960s in Ukraine and Latvia. Her research focuses on the evolution of investigative and interrogation practices during this period, with particular attention to differences in Soviet retribution policies between territories that had been part of the USSR since the 1920s and those annexed on the eve of Hitler’s invasion. Among other questions, she will examine how distinct social networks and patterns of everyday interaction before, during, and after the war may have influenced pre-trial investigations, particularly the process of witness interrogation.
Her project relies on the Museum’s extensive holdings of documents from former Soviet archives and incorporates memoir and oral history collections to juxtapose witness statements from these trials with accounts preserved in other types of sources.
Residency Period: September 1, 2026 – December 31, 2026