Dr Nataliya Kibita’s main research interest is Ukraine’s state- and nation-building. In particular, she is interested in a historical explanation of systemic differences between contemporary Ukraine and Russia. Her doctoral thesis is a study of relations between the Ukrainian republican authorities and the Soviet central authorities after Stalin’s death and during the Khrushchev era, based on archival material from the Kiev and Moscow archives.
Currently, she is working on a new research project that explores the historical origins of formal and informal political institutions that allow Ukraine to rebuff authoritarianism today. Is resistance to authoritarianism a feature of Ukrainian politics that was acquired after 1991? Or was Ukraine resistant to authoritarianism during Soviet times but due to lack of studies on Ukraine’s Soviet politics we ignore this continuity? The aim of the project is to test a hypothesis that along with the negative legacies that independent Ukraine inherited from the Soviet system such as corruption in state administration and judiciary, Ukraine also inherited a very positive legacy of which Russia, whose role in the Soviet Union differed from Ukraine’s, was deprived, a political system that is less centralised and more inclusive than Russia’s which makes Ukraine resistant to authoritarian governance today.
Before joining the LSE in September 2015, Dr Kibita taught Soviet history at the University of Edinburg and University of Glasgow. Dr Kibita obtained her DPhil from the University of Geneva in 2008, her MA in European Studies from the European Institute of the University in Geneva (2001), and a BA in Culture studies from the National University ‘Ostroh Academy’ (1999) in Ukraine.
Dr Nataliya Kibita's publications:
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Soviet Economic Management Under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform, London: Routledge, 2013
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‘Controlling resources in the Ukrainian SSR during the Sovnarkhoz reform (1957–1965): Testing the Idea of Decentralisation’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol. 65, No. 6, August 2013, pp. 1171–1191
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‘De-Stalinising economic administration: Ukrainian alternative vision (1953–1965)’, in De-Stalinization reconsidered: Persistence and Change in the Soviet Union, Thomas M. Bohn (Hg.), Rayk Einax (Hg.), Michel Abeßer (Hg.) (eds), Campus, November 2014, pp. 161–173
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‘Moscow–Kiev Relations and the Sovnarkhoz Reform,’ in Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953-1964, ed. By Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, Routledge, 2011, pp. 94–111
Work in progress:
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‘Misreading the masses, or why Ukraine failed to create an independent state in 1917’