Dr. Evgenia Lezina is a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam. Since 2018, she has been working on the project “Political and Power Resources of Soviet State Security: Structures, Practices, and Methods of the KGB in the Last Decades of the Soviet Union.” Previously, she was a senior research fellow in the Socio-Political Department of the Levada Center in Moscow and a visiting fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship in Berlin, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She received her PhD from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in 2010. Her research interests include the history of the Soviet secret police and transitional justice in former dictatorships.
Lezina is the author of The Twentieth Century: Working Through the Past. Transitional Justice Practices and the Politics of Memory in Former Dictatorships: Germany, Russia, and the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe (New Literary Observer, 2021), which was awarded the Enlightener–2022 book prize in the special PolitProsvet category for the best publication addressing “contemporary socio-political processes and helping to understand their essence.” Her second book project, Making an Enemy of Ukraine: The Role of the KGB in Propaganda and Shaping Anti-Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Stalin Era (forthcoming), examines the Soviet security police’s efforts in the post-Stalin period to combat so-called “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” through covert operations and mass propaganda. Lezina’s current research explores the KGB’s new modus operandi and agent-operational practices in the post-Stalin era.
Since January 2026
Research Associate
DFG project “Mass Social Control in Action: The New Modus Operandi and Agent-Operational Activities of the KGB in Shaping Soviet Society in the Post-Stalin Era (Early 1950s–1991)”
Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam
October 2024 – December 2025
Sakharov Fellow / Associated Researcher
Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam
October 2018 – September 2024
Research Associate
DFG project “The Soviet State Security’s Political and Power Resources: KGB Structures, Practices, and Methods in the Last Decade of the Soviet Union”
Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam
2014 – 2018
Senior Research Fellow / Associate Researcher
Socio-Political Department, Analytical Center of Yuri Levada (Levada Center), Moscow
April – July 2017
Visiting Research Fellow
Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam
April – September 2016
Visiting Research Fellow
Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
June 2012 – December 2013
Visiting Research Fellow
Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, Berlin
(with Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Fellowship)
January – July 2008
Sakharov Research Fellow
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
2011 – 2012
Research Project Coordinator
Levada Center; International Society “Memorial,” Moscow
2006 – 2010
PhD, Political Systems and Institutional Change
IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy
2004 – 2005
MA, Political Science
University of Manchester / Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
