1970–
A historian of de-Stalinization, memory, and cultural change
A historian of de-Stalinization's memory politics, she served as historical consultant to Armando Iannucci's satire of the post-Stalin power struggle, The Death of Stalin (2017).
Polly Jones is a British historian of Russian and Soviet culture whose work examines memory politics in authoritarian societies. Her research shows that after the 1956 Secret Speech, de-Stalinization was not only a reform directed from above but also a negotiated process in which writers and citizens navigated censorship and official memory. Her monograph and edited work analyse cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era, the myths and memories of the Stalinist past, and the tension between the Thaw's ideals and its lived responses.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2004Co-edited The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships
- 2006Edited The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization
- 2007–2011Lecturer, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL
- 2013Published Myth, Memory, Trauma
- 2019Published Revolution Rekindled
- 2020–현재Professor of Russian, University of Oxford
Related historical events
Censorship, memory, and Gulag literature
Jones’s research examines how citizens of authoritarian regimes, especially writers and other cultural practitioners, find ways to express themselves while navigating or evading censorship and political controls. She has studied how memories of Soviet and Russian experiences and traumas were articulated in Soviet-published, samizdat, and tamizdat narratives during the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev eras. Her later work has extended to literature and culture in the Putin era, particularly contemporary memory politics surrounding the Stalinist and Soviet past. Her 2024 book, Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin, treats Gulag literature from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. This work considers literary memory as expression shaped and circulated under the constraints of official narratives and censorship.