Participant Info
- First Name
- Nadezhda
- Last Name
- Beliakova
- Country
- Germany
- State
- nadezhda.beliakova@uni-bielefeld.de
- Affiliation
- University of Bielefeld
- Website URL
- https://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/pers_publ/publ/PersonDetail.jsp?personId=360863652
- Keywords
- religion and Cold war, gender and religion in post soviet countries, faith based activism, entangled history of religion
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Dr. Nadezhda Beliakova is a historian specializing in the history of religious everyday life under state-imposed restrictions in Eastern Europe during the socialist period. She earned her PhD from the Faculty of History at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2009, where she defended her dissertation The Evolution of Church-State Relations in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic Republics in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century.
Her research focuses on the interplay between law, politics, and religion, with particular attention to informal regulatory mechanisms within religious communities, and the (non-)regulation of gender relations in religious groups. She is particularly interested in how legal and extralegal frameworks shape religious practices and identities, as well as the intersections of gender, religion, and law in different historical contexts.
She has extensively explored the entangled history of religion during the Cold War, investigating religious encounters across the Iron Curtain and the role of neutral states in these interactions. Her recent work also examines Soviet and post-Soviet gender policies and its effects in religious communities, focusing on their legal, ideological, and everyday implications.
- Recent Publications
Tatiana Vagramenko & Nadezhda Beliakova (eds), “The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR“ (Lexington Books, 2025)
Barbara Martin & Nadezhda Beliakova (eds), Religious Life in the Late Soviet Union From Survival to Revival (1960s-1980s) (Routledge, 2023)
Nadezhda Beljakova & Thomas Bremer & Katharina Kunter , “Es gibt keinen Gott!” Kirchen und Kommunismus. Eine Konfliktgeschichte. (Herder Verlag, 2016)
Nadezhda Beliakova & Miriam Dobson, Zhenshchiny v evangel’skikh obshchinakh poslevoennogo SSSR (1940-80-u gg.). Issledovanie i istochniki [Women in the Evangelical Communities of the Post-War USSR (1940s-1980s). Research and Sources] (Moscow, Indrik: 2015)
Elena Beliakova & Nadezhda Beliakova & Elena Emchenko. Zhenshchina v pravoslavii: tserkovnoe pravo i rossiiskaia praktika [Woman in the Orthodoxy: Church Low and Russian Practice] (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011)
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- Ukraine, Lettland, Litauen, Belarus', Kasakhstan, Russland, Moldova
- Expertise by Geography
- Eastern Europe, Germany, Russia
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Emancipation, Gender, Human Rights, Migration & Immigration, Religion, Women
