Tomila Lankina

Tomila Lankina is Professor at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s and Balliol colleges).

She has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regimes in Russia and other countries; she has also analysed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine.

She is the author of three previous academic books. Her latest book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press; 2022), has in 2023 won the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association; and has received “Honorable Mention” for the Giovanni Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. A short video on the book, which challenges the narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution as a great social watershed, can be found here.

Her first book for the general reader, To Live For Freedom: A History of Dissent in Russia, will be published by Penguin Press in the UK and Public Affairs in the US.

Photo courtesy of LSE