Dr. Steven E. Harris (HIST) recently published “The World’s Largest Airline: How Aeroflot Learned to Stop Worrying and Became a Corporation” in Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. The article explores Aeroflot’s unlikely success in besting Pan Am on their shared route between New York and Moscow (1968-1991), and how the Soviet airline learned to be a corporation in the process. Harris also featured this story in the exhibit “Cold War Friendly Skies” at Simpson Library in 2020. The research and writing on both projects were generously funded by the University of Mary Washington and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. If you haven’t flown on an airplane recently and miss it, this article is for you!

Associate Professor of European and Modern Russian History Steven E. Harris penned an editorial on Communist dictator Joseph Stalin and and Soviet aircraft engineer Andrei Tupolev in advance of his Great Lives lecture on Thursday Jan. 28, at 7:30 pm on Zoom, as part of UMW’s “Great Lives” series. It can be accessed at umw.edu/greatlives.

Associate Professor Steven E. Harris (HISA) recently published the following peer-reviewed article: “Dawn of the Soviet Jet Age: Aeroflot Passengers and Aviation Culture under Khrushchev,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, 3 (Summer 2020): 591-626.

In this article, Harris examines how representations of the ideal Soviet passenger became a central feature of aviation culture under Khrushchev and bolstered the state’s broader goals of advancing mass consumption, embracing the scientific-technical revolution, and fighting the Cold War. The research and writing for this article and the broader book project on which it is based were generously funded by an A. Verville Fellowship at the National Air & Space Museum and multiple grants from the University of Mary Washington, including a Waple Professorship. Many of the themes in Harris’s article are also featured in the exhibition, “Cold War Friendly Skies,” which is on display at the entrance to Simpson Library.

Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in an article about a new housing development in a residential area of Kiev, in Ukraine. The article, entitled “Soviet housing was famously drab. This Ukraine complex is all about color,” states, “‘Scholars say housing is one realm where the Soviet Union did what the United States could not: provide cheap, reasonably decent housing for everyone.’ ‘They actually did solve the housing question,’ said Steven Harris, a historian at the University of Mary Washington and author of Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life After Stalin.”