Daria Tashkinova holds a bachelor’s degree in European studies from Ural Federal University and a joint master’s degree in Global History from the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin. Her thesis explored personal perceptions of labour mobility and the connections between labour migration and higher education in the late Soviet Union. During her studies, she served on the editorial board of Global Histories: A Student Journal. After graduating, she spent several years working in German political think tanks, focusing on civil society cooperation and the protection of human rights in Eastern Europe and Russia. She is currently a PhD candidate in the RECET (University of Vienna) doc.funds project "The Dynamics of Change and Logics of Transformation: State, Society and Economy at Critical junctures". Her dissertation focuses on the labour migration and the implementation of the job assignment system in late Soviet Estonia and Latvia.

Research interests

• Late Socialism in Central and Eastern Europe
• Labour migration and its regimes
• Soviet history in a colonial context
• History of transformations post-1989
• Global history
• Oral history

Current project

’Assignments to Towns of Provincial Importance’: The project aims to examine the Soviet raspredelenie system, the mandatory job assignment of university graduates, as a tool of state-directed migration, social engineering, and empire-building in the Baltic republics (Estonia and Latvia) from the 1958 educational reforms to 1991. It analyzes relations between central authorities and the Soviet Baltics through the system’s bureaucratic evolution, its role in sovietisation and russification, and the migration flows it generated. Combining archival research and work with contemporary periodicals, with a focus on the expanding cohort of engineers, the project traces both structural dynamics and lived experiences: how young specialists navigated mobility, how local societies received them, and the scope of agency within state assignment. By centring the Baltic experience, the study illuminates mechanisms of Soviet state-building and labour control under “mature socialism,” and situates Soviet and post-Soviet transformations within broader debates on education, migration, and labour in the socialist world.