Elena Racheva is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on militarization and patriotic mobilization of contemporary Russian society. She soon will join the CrimGov project where she will be exploring emergence of the criminal fraternity vory-v-zakone (thieves-in-law) and its role in governing prisons in the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Previously, Elena worked as a special correspondent of an independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She published a book Article 58. Unseized. Stories of GULAG Survivors and Perpetrators (2016), translated into four languages. She holds an MA in History from The University of Manchester and MA in Journalism from The Moscow State University.