Liudmila Listrovaya

My research develops two connected strands: the transnational political lives of Russia's post-2022 exiles, and the environmental politics of authoritarian extraction. This page describes the book project, the major studies in each strand, and where the work has appeared.

BOOK PROJECT

Unsettled Loyalties: Russian Migrants and the Struggle to Belong in Divided Worlds

Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia experienced the largest political exodus in its modern history. Unsettled Loyalties asks what happened to the political lives of those who left. Despite strong grievances and dense co-ethnic networks, the conditions under which diasporas are expected to mobilize, most of Russia's new political migrants have gone quiet. The book explains why.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with Russian political migrants in Georgia, Serbia, and Germany, I show how the Russian state projects power beyond its borders, through surveillance, familial leverage, and legal precarity, and how host-country institutions and media ecologies shape what exiled citizens can say and do. I develop the concept of silence after exit: deliberate political non-engagement as a calculated strategy of risk management under transnational repression, rather than an expression of apathy. The book traces how migrants weigh safety against solidarity, how they hold themselves in readiness for onward moves toward safer democracies, and what their predicament reveals about the fragility of democratic belonging in an age of mobile authoritarianism.

The first article from the project appeared in Social Forces (2025); a second, Ambient Repression: Audiences, Legibility, and the Demobilization of Russian Diaspora in Serbia, is currently under review; and an invited contribution to a Migration Studies special issue (in development) examines how Russian migrants in Serbia imagine Serbia's political future through the lens of their own failed political activist in Russia in 2010s.

STRAND I: Migration, Exile, and Transnational Repression

Authoritarian power no longer stops at the border. This strand of my research examines how the Russian state reaches its citizens abroad, and how exile reshapes political identity, civic voice, and belonging.

Strategic non-engagement and the spillover of authoritarianism. Based on fieldwork with relokanti in Georgia, I show that new Russian migrants' political silence is a calculated response to the extraterritorial spillover of authoritarian threat: avoiding political talk with family in Russia, abstaining from social-media activism, staying away from host-country political initiatives. Published in Social Forces (2025).

Militarized inequality and the costs of war. A quantitative study of male mortality across Russian regions (2018–2023) shows that wartime mobilization interacts with structural inequality: economically deprived regions and legally designated Indigenous homelands bore disproportionate increases in male mortality. Disposable Soldiers: Authoritarian Governance, Colonial Legacies, and Wartime Militarized Inequality in Russia is currently under review.

Migrants between host states and homelands. Ongoing work compares how legal and discursive regimes across Georgia, Serbia, and the EU shape exiles' civic trajectories and stepwise movement toward more democratic destinations, and examines Russian migrants' position between Russophilia and dissent in Serbian society.

READ MY SOCIAL FORCES ARTICLE ABOUT RUSSIAN POLITICAL MIGRANTS

STRAND II: Environmental Politics and Inequality under Authoritarian Rule

This strand examines how extractive industries and authoritarian power jointly produce environmental injustice, and what environmental justice means when the state is the primary agent of harm.

Pollution follows hierarchy.

Using regional data and statistical modeling within a STIRPAT framework, I find that resource extraction is significantly associated with higher pollution; that ethnic diversity amplifies extraction's environmental consequences; and that officially designated Indigenous territories experience substantially more pollution than other regions. Environmental injustice in Russia is politically produced through authoritarian governance and the spatial hierarchies of internal colonialism. Published in Environmental Sociology (2026).

READ MY ARTICLE ON ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY

2. Modern-day Extractivism in Russia as 21st-century internal colonialism.

A companion article develops the theoretical framework, connecting extraction, settler colonialism, and state power in the post-Soviet context. Published in Environmental Sociology (2025).

My research on environmental inequality and politics in Russia examines how natural resource extraction disproportionately affects ethnically diverse and Indigenous regions, reinforcing long-standing patterns of marginalization and internal colonialism. I argue that environmental harms in Russia are not randomly distributed but are shaped by historical legacies of colonialism, state extractivism, and authoritarian governance that suppress local resistance and obscure accountability. This work contributes to broader debates in environmental sociology and political ecology by highlighting how environmental injustice operates in non-democratic contexts and how it intersects with ethnic hierarchies and territorial governance in the Russian Federation.

READ MY LATEST ARTICLE ON ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY IN RUSSIA

3. Scapegoat ecology.

Fieldwork with loggers in Northwestern Russia shows how authoritarian-populist narratives redirect blame for deforestation toward external enemies, displacing science-based knowledge and muting local resistance. Published in Society & Natural Resources (2024).

READ MY ARTICLE ON SCAPEGOAT ECOLOGY

Photos from my fieldwork

Older work:

Corruption and informal exchange (2021)

Previously I published a research article on informal exchanges and reciprocity in Russia. Research Article "What Does a “Thank you” Cost? Informal Exchange and the Case of “Brift” in Contemporary Russia", was published in Qualitative Sociology in 2021.

This article addresses the complex nature of informal exchange in contemporary Russia. I borrow the term “brift” from Abel Polese in order to analyze a hybrid nature of informal transactions that have a ternary nature embodying bribery, gift-giving, and a mechanism of building social capital. While there exists a wealth of studies on informal exchange in Post-Soviet states and modern Russia, the question of how participants of the exchange make sense of the transactions and conditions of the exchange, how they morally and mentally estimate the value and price of the favors, and how they choose appropriate items for reciprocating for the favors still remains understudied. The study addresses this theoretical dilemma and provides a detailed investigation of the meaning-making process intrinsic to this type of informal transaction. This research generally points to the need for greater sensitivity to intricacies of meaning, practice, and cognitive work that saturate informal exchange, and further calls for a wider acceptance of the concept of brift.