Anna Efimova

Research Topic

Russian Imperial Policies and Homosexual Desire: Legal, Scholarly, and Popular Discourses in the Borderlands (1801–1920s)

Supervisor: Zbigniew Wojnowski and Tamar Koplatadze

Project description: My project examines the regulation of homosexuality in the borderland regions of Transcaucasia (the South Caucasus) during Russian imperial and early Soviet expansion in 1801-1920s. Specifically, I attempt to explain how and why Caucasian nationalities accounted for 80% of male sodomy convicts in the empire by 1913. I am also working on the question of why the Bolsheviks criminalised male sodomy in Transcaucasian republics in the early 1920s while decriminalising male same-sex relations elsewhere in the USSR in 1922. My research at Oxford is generously supported by the Hill Foundation.

I earned an MA in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Vienna (2023) and an international MA in Central and East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, jointly awarded by the University of Glasgow, the University of Tartu in Estonia, and Jagiellonian University in Poland (2019). 

In 2025, I produced, wrote, and hosted aт award-nominated podcast on the history of female anti-war activism in Russia.

GRANTS & SCHOLARSHIPS 

2023 Field Work Research Grant – CEU Budapest Foundation 

2022 MA Scholarship, tuition fee waiver – Central European University 

2019 Erasmus Mundus MA Scholarship, tuition fee waiver – European Commission 

2018 Erasmus+ Exchange Scholarship – European Commission

PUBLICATIONS 

“Homosexuality, Nationalism, and Imperial Anxiety in the Early 20th Century Caucasus”. The Peripheral Histories, BASEES, 2024. URL: https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/post/homosexuality-nationalism-and imperial-anxiety-in-the-early-20th-century-caucasus

(Russian editor) “Насилие и молчание. Красная армия в Венгрии во Второй Мировой войне” (Violence and Silence. The Red Army in Hungary in World War II) by Andrea Peto. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Vol. 272, Ibidem, 2023.

CONFERENCES & TALKS

JUN 2024 “Persecution of 'sexual crimes' in Georgia in the late imperial time”, public lecture at Auditoria (Tbilisi, Georgia).

APR 2024 “Male sodomy and Baha faith. Politics of sexuality in the late imperial Caucasus in the context of the movement of ideas on nationality, religions, and modernity”. Caucasus Research Forum, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, online.

MAR 2023 “Filling the gaps in the history of homosexuality of the Russian Empire from a post-colonial perspective”. LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk, University College London, March 23-24, online.