Dr. Ksenia Litvinenko
Research Associate | Contemporary History and Archive
03362 793-142
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Ksenia Litvinenko is a historian of architecture. She received a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Manchester in 2023, supported by the President’s Doctoral Scholar Award and the German Historical Institute Doctoral Fellowship. Her PhD thesis worked with and through dispersed archives of the Giproteatr Design and Research Institute, one of the most influential organisations behind the mass construction and refurbishment of buildings for culture and performing arts in the Soviet Union and abroad. Litvinenko’s current personal and collaborative research concerns the institutional history of the architectural profession in the transnational Socialist Bloc, mobilities of architecture, technology, and knowledge in the last decades of the Cold War, and architectural governance of mobility and sedentism. For the duration of her placement at the IRS, Litvinenko collaborates with the Research Group "Histories of the Built Environment" led by Dr Monika Motylińska  to facilitate scientific exchange and strengthen comparative perspectives on the German and Soviet frameworks for the twentieth-century global architectural mobilities.

Projects

Ongoing Third-party Funded Projects

Third-party funded project 12/2024 - 11/2026
Accommodating Extractivism. Mobile Architecture and Rotational Urbanism in Western Siberia, 1980–1992

Through archival research on Soviet design and construction organisations, this research project critically historicises Western Siberia’s material transformation into the world’s largest fossil fuel extractivist region during the late Soviet oil boom. How were the state’s extractivist goals shaped and reshaped by urban planning, architecture and construction technologies? What were the consequences of these for local Indigenous communities and Soviet society at large? more info

Selected Publications by Year

2024
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980. Architecture Beyond Europe, (23). https://journals.openedition.org/abe/16242
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Überlegungen zu provisorischer Architektur in der Sowjetunion. IRS aktuell, (101), 46-48. https://leibniz-irs.de/fileadmin/user_upload/IRS_Aktuell_101_April_2024_Auslandsbau.pdf
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Restoring Autonomy out of Context. Selective Heritagisation of the Drama Theatre in Veliky Novgorod. Les Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale Urbaine et Paysagère, (21). https://doi.org/10.4000/12x4y
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Performing Universality: Building Norms and the Circulation of Theatre Architecture in the RSFSR. In M. Colla, & P. Betts (Eds.), Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century (pp. 219–250). (St Antony's Series). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54581-8_9
Litvinenko, K. (2024, May 24). Soviet Mobile Architecture: Enabling Colonial Resettlement, Displacement and Extractivism in Western Siberia, 1960-1993: Final report for Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. The Blinken OSA Archivum. https://web.osaarchivum.org/uploads/LITVINENKO_202311_f6bdd41645.pdf
2022
Litvinenko, K. (2022). Contextualising Appraisal and the Destruction of the Soviet Design Institute’s Archives: A Field note. Edinburgh Architecture Research, 37, 6-22. https://doi.org/10.2218/ear.2022.7258

Selected Publications by Type

Journal Article
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980. Architecture Beyond Europe, (23). https://journals.openedition.org/abe/16242
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Restoring Autonomy out of Context. Selective Heritagisation of the Drama Theatre in Veliky Novgorod. Les Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale Urbaine et Paysagère, (21). https://doi.org/10.4000/12x4y
Litvinenko, K. (2022). Contextualising Appraisal and the Destruction of the Soviet Design Institute’s Archives: A Field note. Edinburgh Architecture Research, 37, 6-22. https://doi.org/10.2218/ear.2022.7258
Contribution to Anthology
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Performing Universality: Building Norms and the Circulation of Theatre Architecture in the RSFSR. In M. Colla, & P. Betts (Eds.), Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century (pp. 219–250). (St Antony's Series). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54581-8_9
Contribution to Special Interest Journal
Litvinenko, K. (2024). Überlegungen zu provisorischer Architektur in der Sowjetunion. IRS aktuell, (101), 46-48. https://leibniz-irs.de/fileadmin/user_upload/IRS_Aktuell_101_April_2024_Auslandsbau.pdf
Final or Preliminary Project Report (even if not published)
Litvinenko, K. (2024, May 24). Soviet Mobile Architecture: Enabling Colonial Resettlement, Displacement and Extractivism in Western Siberia, 1960-1993: Final report for Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. The Blinken OSA Archivum. https://web.osaarchivum.org/uploads/LITVINENKO_202311_f6bdd41645.pdf

Talks

2025
We used to live in tents and then in railway wagons”: Visions, Experiences and Critiques of Late Soviet Extractive Urbanism in Western Siberia'

The social experiences of urban space in socialist cities of Eastern Europe

January/31/2025
The University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

2024
Spaces and Imaginaries of Socialist Extractivism

Spaces and Imaginaries of Socialist Extractivism

November/21/2024
Boston Mariott Copley Place, Boston, United States

Acclimatising extractivism: mobile architecture and rotational urbanism in western Siberia, 1960-1992

The 2024 quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)

July/16/2024
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Provisional Architectures of Soviet Extractivism

May/07/2024