Michael Loader received his PhD in History from King’s College London in November 2015. His thesis was entitled ‘The Thaw in Soviet Latvia: National Politics 1953-1959’. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of WWII and its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2016-2017. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University since August 2017, and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies since January 2018.
His research interests include nationality politics, centre-periphery relations and the Soviet Baltic. His current projects include an article about a wave of purges across the Soviet Republics in the late 1950s, and larger projects about the changing relationship between the Soviet centre and the periphery between 1944 and 1964, and patronage systems in the Soviet system focusing on the careers of Soviet chief ideologue Mikhail Suslov and his protégé Soviet Latvian leader and later Politburo member Arvīds Pelše. His publications have appeared in Europe-Asia Studies,Nationalities Papers, the Journal of Baltic Studies, and the Journal of the Institute of Latvian History.