Jonathan Raspe

Jonathan Raspe is a Ph.D. candidate in Russian, East European, and Eurasian history at Princeton University. His dissertation is a social, political, and cultural history of heavy industry in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics after the Second World War. Focusing on the Minsk Tractor Works in Belarus and the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works in Kazakhstan, the dissertation argues that industrialization anchored Soviet power in the former Eurasian borderlands and demonstrates how the country’s federal structure in turn shaped Soviet economic development more broadly. His collaboration with the NTAutonomy team began with a contribution to the special issue published in Nationalities Papers on Jewish national autonomy in 1920s Ukraine. As an Ernst Mach Fellow, he is working on a chapter on industrialization, Russification, and ethnic tokenism in Soviet Kazakhstan.