Jonathan Raspe is a historian of modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia specializing in imperial, ethnic, and economic history. He has published on labor recruitment, indigenization campaigns, and Jewish national autonomy in Soviet Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

Raspe is currently completing a book manuscript on the industrialization of the Soviet Union’s national republics from the interwar period through the late 1980s, Empire of Industry: Ethnicity and Industrialization across Soviet Eurasia. It examines how the Soviet fixation on industry shaped ethnicity in the Soviet Union, analyzing republican politics, shop-floor relations, elite careers, and literary representations of workers, factories, and industrial products. The book argues that industrialization integrated non-Russian populations and territories into a single body politic, while perpetuating ethnic hierarchies and fueling distinct national interests in the Union republics.

“Soviet Internationalism in Industrial Recruitment: Training Kazakh and Belarusian Workers in Russia and Ukraine, 1944—1959,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 26, no. 4 (Fall 2025).

“Soviet National Autonomy in the 1920s: The Dilemmas of Ukraine’s Jewish Population,” in Nationalities Papers 50, no. 5 (September 2022): 886–905.

“Nation wider Willen: Weißrussland in der Sowjetunion, 1921–1931,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 66, no. 2 (July 2018): 218–244.