Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor, Ion Creanga State University of Moldova

Expert Bio

Dr. Dumitru has held fellowships, including Fulbright Scholarship for research at Georgetown University, Gerda Henkel Stiftung fellowship, and a research fellowship at the USHMM. She has authored over forty articles and two books. Her second book, The State, Antisemitism and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Currently, Dr. Dumitru is working on two projects. While at the Wilson Center she is working on her manuscript “Indispensable Yet Suspect: Soviet Jews under Late Stalinism.” Together with Chad Bryant and Kateřina Čapková, she is writing on a book titled “The Trial that Shook the World: The Slánský Process and the Dynamics of Czechoslovak Stalinism,” a project supported by the American Council of Learned Societies. Dr. Dumitru is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Journal of Genocide Research, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, East European Jewish Affairs.

Expertise

• Cold War
• History
• Europe
• Russia and Eurasia

• Soviet Union, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Ukraine

Wilson Center Project

Indispensable Yet Suspect: Soviet Jews under Late Stalinism

Project Summary

This project explores the interaction between Jews, gentiles, and state institutions during late Stalinism, while simultaneously probing Soviet nationality policies, center-periphery relations, and the process of Sovietization of the USSR’s western borderland. By focusing on the development of the “Jewish question” in both the center and new periphery (Soviet Moldavia), it reveals how local expediencies and central policies collided, amalgamated, and rearranged Moscow’s rules and priorities. Importantly, the project offers new insights on the short and long-term impacts of the post-WWII inclusion of western territories on the functionality of the Soviet system itself.

Major Publications

• Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and the Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Diana Dumitru and Carter Johnson, “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Co-operation: Why Some People Harmed and Others Helped Jews during the Romanian Holocaust,” World Politics, Vol. 63, no. 1 (January 2011), p. 1-42
• Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 986-1008