Andrey Gornostaev

Andrey Gornostaev's interests lie in the fields of Russian social and transnational histories, and he is particularly fascinated with stories of ordinary people's (peasants and townsfolk) interactions with the imperial state in different settings, both in the center and the periphery. Currently, he is working on turning into a book his doctoral dissertation "Peasants 'on the Run': State Control, Fugitives, Social and Geographic Mobility in Imperial Russia, 1649-1796," in which he examines the state's policies against unauthorized peasant migration, peasants' strategies of living on the run, and the influence of peasant flight on the relationships among different social categories of eighteenth-century Russia. In addition to this project, Dr. Gornostaev has begun working on a new project that explores how the problems and processes occurring in borderlands (flight, crime, violence, disease) between Russia and Poland-Lithuania shaped the states' relations during the eighteenth century and how they allow us to shed new light on the history of the Partitions of Poland.