Kyrill Kunakhovich

About Fellow

Kyrill Kunakhovich (BA Yale University, PhD Princeton University) is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. His first book, Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany (2022) explored the political role of cultural spaces in the Eastern Bloc. Under communist regimes that banned free speech, political discussions shifted to spaces of art: theaters, galleries, concert halls, and youth clubs. Cultural spaces therefore came to function as a public sphere, or a rare outlet for discussing public affairs. Communism’s Public Sphere won the Kulczycki Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, received honorable mention for the Oskar Halecki Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and was shortlisted for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize.

Kunakhovich’s current project looks at the reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town. Demolished by the Nazis during WWII, the Old Town was then systematically rebuilt—not as it was, but as a fantasy of what it should have been. The reconstruction was widely hailed abroad amid concerns that Western cities, too, were losing their identity to modernization. Warsaw’s example inspired historic preservation codes in Western Europe, the United States, and eventually UNESCO, where Polish architects helped write the World Heritage List’s rules. A Stalinist construction project turned into a global model, shaping our contemporary notions of heritage.

Selected Publications

• Kunakhovich, Kyrill. “’What German Thought Cannot Express’: Gert Neumann Reads Adam Michnik.” In Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, and Katharine White (eds.), Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025.
• Kunakhovich, Kyrill. “Antoni Słonimski’s UNESCO: On the Uses of International Organizations in Cold War Poland.” Slavic Review 83:2 (Summer 2024), 264–280.
• Kunakhovich, Kyrill. Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022.
• Kunakhovich, Kyrill and Piotr Kosicki, eds. The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019.
• Kunakhovich, Kyrill. “The Red Director: Karl Kayser and the Evolution of GDR Theater.” The German Studies Review 40:1 (February 2017), 103–121.