On June 12th, Dr. Pamela A. Jordan presented “Stalin’s Singing Spy: The Life and Exile of Nadezhda Plevitskaya.” This lecture presentation was part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday lecture series.
Dr. Jordan’s presentation explores the remarkable life of Nadezhda Plevitskaya (c. 1879-1940), a Russian peasant girl who achieved fame as one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favorite singers. The lecture considers decades-spanning chapters in Plevitskaya’s life, including her relationship with former White Russian General Nicholai Skoblin and the couple’s involvement in Stalin’s covert operations. Through the arc of the presentation, larger themes such as political turmoil, émigré experience, and the research process are considered.
The program concluded with an audience-based question and answer session.
More on this topic can be found in Dr. Jordan’s publication, Stalin’s Singing Spy: The Life and Exile of Nadezhda Plevitskaya.
This program is funded in part by a Humanities New York CARES Grant with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act.
About the Speaker
Pamela A. Jordan is Associate Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at Southern New Hampshire University. Before repatriating to the United States in 2011, she was an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to her book on Plevitskaya, Stalin’s Singing Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Dr. Jordan’s publications include Defending Rights in Russia: Lawyers, the State, and Legal Reform in the Post-Soviet Era (University of British Columbia Press, 2005) and articles in such scholarly journals as African Studies Quarterly, American Journal of Comparative Law, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Climatic Change, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Europe-Asia Studies, and The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. Apart from working in academe, she served as the executive director of the NGO Committee on Disarmament in New York City and as a program assistant at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the Wilson Center (Smithsonian Institution), in Washington, DC.