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Dr Lara Douds

Assistant Professor

Department: Humanities

Lara is an Assistant Professor in History, having joined Northumbria in 2019 as Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History. She previously taught at the Universities of Leeds, York and Durham. 

She is a specialist in the history of government, political practice and political culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. Her research explores continuity across the revolutionary divide of 1917, specifically the Soviet government’s inheritance, in structures, culture and practice, from the Tsarist past and how this legacy interacted with revolutionary ideology and circumstance. 

Her first monograph Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State was published by Bloomsbury in February 2018. This book is the first English-language, archive-based study to examine the practical functioning and internal culture of the early Soviet cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars, to explore its period as a coalition government, and to elucidate the process by which governmental decision-making authority migrated from ‘state’ to supreme Communist Party bodies during the early years of Soviet power, in part due to the dysfunction generated by experimental ‘democratizing’ features introduced by Soviet state-builders. 

Lara is co-editor, alongside Professor James Harris (Leeds) and Dr Peter Whitewood (York St John), of the forthcoming book The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41 (Bloomsbury, 2020)and has contributed a chapter ‘Lenin’s Living Link? Petitioning the Ruler in Russia across the revolutionary divide’ to this volume. 

She is currently working on a project ‘Petitioning the Soviet President: Mikhail Kalinin's Reception Office, 1919-1946' which explores the widespread and sustained practice of subjects and citizens writing individual letters of request and complaint to leaders and considers how these petitions were handled by those in power. The project aims to show how this form of petitioning served as a crucial interface between government and governed which can help to illuminate the multi-dimensional nature of persistent authoritarian rule across centuries of Russian history.  

Lara Douds

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • A Hundred Years On: What can Lenin do for us and What can we do for Lenin?, Douds, L. 22 Jan 2025, In: Revolutionary Russia
  • Petitioning the Soviet ‘President’: Mikhail Kalinin’s Reception Office, 1919–1946, Douds, L. 20 Jun 2024, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America, Oxford, Oxford University Press
  • Lenin's 'Living Link'? The Soviet Government Reception, 1917-1921, Douds, L. 28 Jan 2020, The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, London, Bloomsbury
  • Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State, Douds, L. 22 Feb 2018
  • The early Soviet government, 1917-23, Douds, L. 29 Nov 2022, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution, London, Bloomsbury

Campus Address

Room 110 Lipman Building,

Northumbria University,

City Campus, Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 8ST

  • History PhD
  • History MLitt
  • History BA (Hons)


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