Professor Polly Jones, Schrecker-Barbour Tutorial Fellow in Slavonic and East European Studies at Univ and Professor of Russian at Oxford, has been awarded a significant three-year research project grant by the Leverhulme Trust.

The grant, for the amount of £384,368, has been awarded for a collaborative project on “The 101st kilometre: Soviet marginalization, migration, memory and mapping”.

The grant is one of eight awarded to humanities in the UK by the Leverhulme Trust, an independent charity funding research and scholarship with the potential to generate new ideas and research breakthroughs that benefit society.

Professor Jones will collaborate with Dr Miriam Dobson (Sheffield), Ukrainian historian Tamara Vronska and two post-doctoral researchers to explore experiences of those living at the “101st kilometre” in Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Polly Jones in Latvia at the 101st Kilometre

Shortly after coming to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks introduced a law prohibiting former criminals from settling within 100 kilometres of large Russian cities. Building on the traditions and symbolic geography of the Russian empire, the notion of the “101st kilometre” emerged, a space marked by invisible borders, where stigmatised populations (also including dissidents, religious believers, sex workers, and other social marginals) were forced to reside.

The project will use interdisciplinary and comparative analysis to look at how these areas of banishment also became places of refuge and freedom. By exploring the lives of the inhabitants and the communities they created through physical and digitised archival and museum materials as well as memoirs and artistic narratives, the team aim to tackle questions around the navigation of invisible borders, the emergence of communities that challenged Soviet norms and their associated activism, and the evolution of 101st kilometre identities and their commemoration today. The team will produce the first book-length account of the 101st kilometre and a digital atlas mapping this vibrant territory across the twentieth century.

Published: 7 May 2026

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