Andrei is a PhD student at University of California, Santa Cruz in the city of Santa Cruz in the United States. Andrei is currently conducting dissertation research in Russian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan archives with the help of generous funding from the ASEEES Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Andrei’s dissertation, titled "The Culture of Complaint: Morality and Intimacy in the USSR After 1953" examines communist morality in the Soviet Union and the Soviet state’s campaigns to produce the New Socialist Person, a moral Soviet citizen during the postwar period. Andrei’s dissertation not only looks at interactions between central Party organs and ordinary Soviet citizens in Soviet Russia, but also at understudied non-Russian spaces such as the Ukrainian and Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republics. These interactions resulted in a dynamic, negotiated understanding of communist morality and concepts of the New Socialist Person in the discursive spaces of home entertainment, especially television and radio.

Andrei’s research is especially influenced by the fields of postsocialist, postcolonialist, and borderlands frameworks and explores the ways in which Soviet citizens outside of the Russian Federation appropriated and utilized the discourse on communist morality for their own benefit. During his time in Lviv, Andrei will spend his time exploring the links between nationalist movements in Ukraine and the state’s attempts to impose a universal standard of communist morality in Kyiv, Lviv, and Odessa.