Memorial Tribute to Prof Dr Olga Shnyrova (28 October 1957 – 6 November 2025)
With great sorrow we bid farewell to Prof Dr Olga Shnyrova, born on 28 October 1957 and deceased on 6 November 2025. She was born in Ivanovo, Russia, where she lived and worked for many decades. Her death ends a life that stood in an exceptional way for the close connection between critical scholarship, social responsibility, international solidarity and personal courage. At the same time, her life path painfully illustrates the conditions under which independent gender research, historical enlightenment and civil society engagement take place today in authoritarian contexts – and the high price that committed scholars may be forced to pay.
Olga Shnyrova never understood scholarship as a purely academic endeavour. For her, research was always embedded in social realities, historical relations of violence and contemporary political conflicts. As a historian, she worked on the history of her home city of Ivanovo, on politics of memory, on the history of women’s and gender relations, and on transnational networks of political movements, particularly in the Eastern European and post-Soviet context. Her work combined archival precision with theoretical reflection and a clear ethical stance. For her, knowledge was inseparable from responsibility, from the obligation to inform the public, and from a commitment to democratic values.
This stance increasingly brought her into conflict with political developments in Russia. The gender research centre in Ivanovo that she directed, which focused on the history of the city, the life stories of its inhabitants, and women’s and gender studies, was designated by the Russian authorities in 2021 as a “foreign agent organisation”. This classification meant far more than a bureaucratic measure. It publicly placed the centre and its leadership under general suspicion, delegitimised their scholarly work, and made normal research activity virtually impossible. Although the centre ceased all financial activity in 2022, the authorities initiated several administrative proceedings in 2025 for alleged violations of reporting requirements. Severe fines were imposed, reaching existential proportions.
Behind these legal measures lay a profoundly human tragedy. For Olga Shnyrova, the centre was not merely an institution but the work of her life – a place of critical historical research, local memory work and feminist knowledge production. The proceedings were not an abstract legal dispute for her, but an attack on her scholarly existence, her convictions and her personal dignity. The ongoing pressure, public stigmatisation and uncertainty weighed heavily on her. She died at a time when court proceedings were still pending. That her lawyer continued these cases even after Olga’s death, seeking to have the charges overturned, is an expression of respect for her life’s work and recognition of its significance.
At the same time, Olga Shnyrova was highly respected and closely connected internationally. She found a central place of scholarly support, cooperation and solidarity at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. There, she was able to further develop her research in a transdisciplinary, politically alert and internationally oriented environment. Particularly formative was her long-standing collaboration with Ulrike Ernst-Auga, Professor of Cultural, Religious and Gender Studies, who accompanied and supported Olga Shnyrova’s work over many years both academically and politically. Equally important was the support of Gabriele Jähnert, then Director of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, who consistently advocated for the institutional affiliation, visibility and protection of Olga Shnyrova’s research. In an increasingly repressive international environment, this cooperation constituted a rare, protected space in which critical gender and Eastern European studies could be pursued transnationally.
A central focus of Olga Shnyrova’s scholarly work lay in the history of the international women’s movement and communist women’s organisations in the twentieth century. Her research on the International Women’s Secretariat of the Communist International opened new perspectives on female political mobilisation, transnational solidarity and the ambivalences of emancipatory projects. She was not interested in simplified success narratives, but in the complex entanglements of power, ideology, gender and everyday life. She consistently combined historical depth with analyses of contemporary gender relations, authoritarian tendencies and social conflicts.
A particular concern for her was the connection between research, teaching and activism. Olga Shnyrova organised numerous international summer schools, workshops and conferences that went far beyond conventional academic formats. These events created spaces for solidaristic learning, for exchange between generations and regions, and for linking theory with political practice. Topics such as politics of memory, national narratives, gender, democracy, war and peace were not only discussed but made tangible in their social urgency. Many young scholars and activists experienced these formats as formative for their own paths.
A central role in this work was played by her long-standing involvement in the international network RINGS, the International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies. Within this network, Olga Shnyrova was an important voice from Eastern Europe, persistently drawing attention to the increasing repression of gender studies, critical scholarship and feminist movements. Joint events, including in Iceland and most recently in Utrecht, testify to this intensive cooperation and to her international standing. Within the context of RINGS, the situation of gender studies in Eastern Europe was also addressed at the political level. On behalf of RINGS, as the international umbrella organisation for gender studies, Ulrike Ernst-Auga reported at the European Union in Brussels on the persecution of gender studies in Eastern Europe. This intervention made clear that Olga Shnyrova’s personal persecution was part of a structural attack on critical scholarship, and that her work had significance far beyond the national context.
Olga Shnyrova’s commitment to gender and peace was always inseparably linked. She understood feminist scholarship as peace work and peace politics as a fundamentally gendered task. She criticised militarisation, authoritarian power structures and patriarchal forms of violence clearly and consistently, even as such positions increasingly became criminalised. Shortly before her death in 2025, she remained active, planning projects, participating in international meetings and working on new publications.
With the death of Prof Dr Olga Shnyrova, international gender studies lose a courageous, incisive and principled voice. Her work lives on in her writings, in the networks she built, and in the many students, colleagues and activists whom she inspired. Her life reminds us that critical scholarship requires courage – and that such courage leaves traces that extend far beyond a single life.
Ulrike Ernst-Auga