Stalin’s Singing Spy: The Life and Exile of Nadezhda Plevitskaya
An online lecture by Dr. Pamela A. Jordan
In this program, Dr. Jordan will discuss 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. She claimed throughout her career to be fundamentally apolitical, yet decades later in Europe, Plevitskaya was unmasked as one of Stalin’s secret agents along with her husband, former White Russian General Nicholai Skoblin. Their experiences in exile shed light on Stalin’s covert operations and the hardships Russian émigrés faced in interwar Europe, an era of great political and economic turmoil.
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.
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