We are excited to announce the release of “The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR,” edited by Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova. Published by Lexington Books in 2025, this book is one of the key outcomes of the HIDE Project. 

The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents explores the covert world of secret police surveillance within the Soviet Union, delving into lesser-known grassroots religious life and the collusion of religious communities with the Soviet secret police. This book reconstructs the stories of insider agents, focusing on the entanglements and ambiguities of collaboration and secret police surveillance in the Soviet era.  

HIDE received the Impact Case Study Narrative Prize, recognizing its important role in preserving endangered archives and advancing digital conservation efforts that address urgent societal and historical challenges. 

HIDE has been awarded funding by the UCLA Library under the Modern Endangered Archives Programme for the initiative “Saving Vulnerable Past in Wartime: Local Archives in Bucha, Ukraine.” This pilot project focuses on rescuing and preparing for digitization two community archives in Bucha: the Adventist Archive-Museum and the Makariv Archive.

HIDE Project Principal Investigator, Dr. Tatiana Vagramenko, has been honored with the Best Early-Career Researcher of the Year Award at University College Cork.

Principal Investigator Dr. Tatiana Vagramenko participated in the book launch for Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine, edited by Catherine Wanner (Routledge, 2023). The event was organised by Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and available online.

Vagramenko’s contribution to the book, titled “Faith and war: Grassroots Ukrainian Protestantism in the context of the Russian invasion,” is available online here.

PI Dr. Tatiana Vagramenko and Dr. Anca Șincan of the Romanian Academy of Sciences discuss how the secret police archives represent underground religious life. What do they tell us? And what are their limitations? Published on the Eurasian Knot podcast.