Under the advisory of Professor Seth Bernstein, within the History Department at the University of Florida, I am personally interested in investigating how women were treated during interrogation and sentencing of post - WWII files from Tbilisi, and I will pay special attention to questions that were asked as well as actions that were considered more traitorous for women. I am doing this by looking at declassified KGB files from World War II, which were digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. While I do not have a definitive question, my research will look at how these interrogation files shed light on the perception of difference between men and women in the USSR. Is a woman’s treatment consistent with the way men were treated and asked questions? Does the women’s sentence parallel to men? Are there different concerns for men versus women during the occupation of Stalingrad? While I am still in the process of reviewing the files, I have found at least one very interesting case which motivated the previous questions as well as solidified the idea that gender as a variable could be looked at within these files. Aleksandra Petrovna Popova was accused of having personal relations with a German police officer, which seemed to worsen her treatment. ​

​

Methodology

As previously stated, within these files, there are hundreds of pages of either typed or written Russian. Russian cursive is very hard to read at times, so the majority of the time I put into working with these documents comes from transcribing the text. The methodology in which I do this is rather simple. I keep an organized note-taking document, where I write down the page number I am transcribing, translate the text into English (in my head), and write the translation down in my notes. If I feel it necessary, due to maintaining the integrity of the conversation, I will just copy down the Russian text. This often occurs if it is Russian cursive that took me a very long time to transcribe, but that is not very common. After this, on another document, I note down takeaways, important events, and anything I think is interesting. 

​

I have been working on this Project since November of 2024. I am doing this through the University Scholars Program as well as the History Department's Honors Thesis Program.