Professional Affiliation

Post-Doctoral Researcher, University College Cork

Expert Bio

Tatiana is a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork, Ireland. She has an MA in the Study of Religions from St. Petersburg State University and an MA in Anthropology from European University at St. Petersburg. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University. Tatiana’s project “Religious Minorities in Ukraine from the Soviet Underground to the Euromaidan: Pathways to Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Enlarging Europe”, funded by the Irish Research Council, dwells upon historical materials from recently opened SBU (former KGB) archives in Ukraine and the ethnography of the Maidan Revolution. Her work focuses on the politicization of religion in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and the legacy of Soviet religious dissent and religious minorities’ resistance to authoritarian regimes in postsocialist societies. Her current research “Religion under Surveillance: Religious Dissent and Secret Police Archives in Soviet Ukraine” is supported by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and the COST Action.

http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/TatianaVagramenko

Wilson Center Project

Religion under Surveillance: Religious Dissent and Secret Police Archives in Soviet Ukraine

Project Summary

This project addresses one of the most sensitive issues in the history of religion and socialism – the role of secret police agents and “insider” informers in the development of the Soviet-era religious underground. It examines Soviet political surveillance system directed against the religious opposition, focusing on the significance of accessing the secret police files in the exercise of post-socialist transitional justice in Eastern Europe. Using both anthropological methods and historical sources, the project aims to open up new societal debates on the extension of religious pluralism and the re-emergence of religion in the public sphere, offering a new perspective on religious-political dialogue in post-socialist countries.

Major Publications

(Forthcoming, February 2020) Kapaló, James and Tatiana Vagramenko, eds. Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

2018 Chronotopes of Conversion and the Production of Christian Fundamentalism in the Post-Soviet Arctic. Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies, 17(1):63-91.

2018 “I Came not to Bring Peace, but a Sword”: The Politics of Religion after Socialism and the Precariousness of Religious Life in the Russian Arctic. Theological Reflections: Euro-Asian Journal of Theology. Vol. 20: 135-152.