Glennys Young

Prof. Young is accepting new M.A. students but not Ph.D. students for the 2027-2028 academic year

I am a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Over the course of my career, I have become increasingly interested in the USSR’s involvement in transnational movements and processes, whether political, social, cultural, or economic. I have also pursued research interests in the history of Communism and world history. In addition to the books mentioned below, I’ve published articles on a number of topics in Soviet social and political history.

My first book, “Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), examined the Bolshevik project of cultural transformation through a case study of peasants’ responses to the Soviet anti-religious campaign. In 1999, the book was awarded Honorable Mention for the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Prize from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

In 2011, I published ‘The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century: A Global History through Sources” (Oxford University Press). Through a collection of carefully selected documents, some presented for the first time in English translation, the book seeks to provide an inside look at how people around the world subjectively experienced, and contributed to, global communism.

“The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco’s Spain during the Cold War” (Oxford University Press, 2026) reveals the unrecognized political, social, and cultural shockwaves of the Cold War repatriation of Spanish nationals who had been catapulted to the USSR as refugees (including nearly 3000 children) and political exiles in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), or as soldiers who fought for the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War II. What makes the Spanish case distinct with respect to numerous others involving post-World War II repatriations from the USSR is that it involved civilians and military personnel, including prisoners of war. The repatriation of Spanish nationals constituted the largest repatriation of civilians from the USSR to a country in Western Europe during the Cold War. Although the repatriation of Spaniards—both Red Army POWs and civilians—began during World War II, albeit in small numbers, the return of the Spaniards became an international issue beginning in the late 1940s, just as the Cold War was heating up. The book focuses on the eight expeditions of repatriates from the USSR to Franco’s Spain in the second half of the 1950s. There were formidable obstacles to the repatriation of Spaniards during the Cold War’s first full decade, among them the fact that Spain and the USSR did not have diplomatic relations. “The Return” tells the story of the back-channel negotiations, sometimes involving third parties, that resulted in the repatriation expeditions during the 1950s. It also examines the significant role that Spaniards themselves played in advocating for repatriation after Stalin’s death. Although Franco’s Spain sought to “integrate” the repatriates into Spanish society, they faced significant economic and social challenges, including, in some cases, the trauma of being rejected by family members they had longed to see. The book shows how repatriates faced these challenges. In some cases, they chose to return to the USSR. The book compares the repatriation of Spanish POWs in the USSR to post-war repatriation of Italian, German and Japanese POWs.