Research Spotlight: Dr Anastasiia Akulich, Dr Marek Eby, and Dr Simon Huxtable.

I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester in 2022 with a thesis focused on religious celebration and Chinese Orthodox priests in the Russian Orthodox Mission in China. Since then, I have written on religious festivals, Orthodox translations of religious texts and, most recently, doctors associated with the Russian mission.

After finishing my PhD, I have taught at the University of Manchester for a year before joining the University of Leeds in 2023 as a Teaching Fellow in International History. For the two years before joining this project, I have taught modules on East Asian and global history. 

Before Leeds, I completed a PhD in History at New York University (NYU), where I studied Soviet malaria control campaigns of the interwar period. Beyond my PhD, I spent time as a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU.

I came to this project as a specialist on the history of the Soviet Union, with particular expertise in media history. My monograph, News From Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform (Oxford University Press, 2022) looks at how Soviet press negotiated the tumultuous period between 1945 and 1970, drawing on internal editorial documents to better understand how journalists negotiated their twin identities as propagandists and reformers. Since then, I have been working on two projects: one is a history of freedom of information, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (‘Internationalizing Freedom: Decolonization and Media Development after 1945’), which looks at the role of international organizations in debating, legislating and practicing information freedom in post-war media. The second, funded by Wellcome (Connecting3Worlds), looks at Soviet post-war exchanges with the Global South in the field of global health. One strand of this research has looked at the history of Soviet-Chinese exchanges in the field of acupuncture in the 1950s, which will be published in September 2026. The second strand examined the changing ways the Soviet medical press represented healthcare internationalism from 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union.

The project speaks to my key interest in transnational knowledge exchanges, bringing it into the more practical realm of WHO policy making, vaccination schedules and polio vaccine development. The story of Sabin’s vaccine’s testing in the Comecon countries provides a key vantage point for integrating the socialist countries into the global history of medicine.

Study of Soviet participation in the World Health Organization offers an exciting opportunity to broaden existing narratives of global health. Much of the current scholarship focuses on US American (and broadly western) perspectives, underplaying the alternative visions developed by Soviet and state-socialist actors. By adding new perspectives to the literature on key international health challenges - past and present - our project will help to rethink the history of global health. At a moment of considerable uncertainty in this field, I think it will also provide a space to consider possibilities in the present and future.

From a personal point of view, I’m happy to joining the School of History and to contribute to its diverse research culture. I’m delighted to be working as part of a fantastic project team and to have the opportunity to collaborate on research outputs and other activities.

From an academic perspective, I'm excited to work on this project because the Soviet Union has often been written out of histories of global health. By focusing on the country’s response to a range of infectious diseases, I think the project will enrich scholarly understanding the role of health within the Global Cold War, while also offering important lessons for the present. 

As well as conventional archival research in WHO and Wellcome Trust archives, I plan to conduct oral history interviews with researchers, medical professionals and policymakers involved in planning and implementing polio vaccination programmes. I am particularly interested in interrogating how research turned into policy. Network mapping will be used to analyse the transnational connections that facilitated polio vaccine research. 

My work on the project will focus on Soviet contributions to international efforts to combat malaria. Existing research on this topic to date has focused on Global Malaria Eradication Programme (1955-1969), a US-led initiative that figures prominently in the early history of the WHO. My work will reconstruct the little-known Soviet role in this initiative but also examine a longer history of international malaria initiatives - and a broader set of actors involved in them - through the 1970s and 1980s.

My research will focus on the Soviet response to HIV/AIDS in the international sphere. This will involve visiting a wide range of archives, both within the former Soviet Union and also in countries with whom the country initiated bilateral projects of scholarly exchange and development aid. The WHO archives in Geneva will be a crucial port of call, since one of the main focuses of my research will be Soviet activities within the World Health Organization, a subject about which scholarly knowledge remains limited. What contributions did the Soviet Union make to the global response to AIDS, both in terms of scholarly knowledge and public health responses? And to what extent did post-Soviet authorities in the successor republics adopt or reject Soviet practices after the collapse of the USSR?