Irina Makhalova is a Historian, with a special focus on the social history of World War II and retribution policy on the Soviet territories. She has been a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, USA), at the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich, Germany), and the German Historical Institute in Moscow. Also, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Florida from October 2022 until April 2023. Irina has finished a manuscript on the Nazi occupation of Crimea and the retribution policy in this region after the liberation.

Her articles have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Cahiers du Monde Russe, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, and The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Irina completed her Ph.D. in History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) in February 2021.
In June 2023, she has started her fellowship as Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Already during World War II, the process of the prosecution the Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices had started everywhere in Europe, continuing during the Cold War. In the Soviet Union, the trials were firstly carried out during the war and continued until the collapse of the Soviet system. The research aims to analyse the Soviet closed postwar trials of collaborators who were involved in the crimes against the Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.

Starting with the first phase of trials (1941 to the early 1950s), her research encompasses the period of rapid and intensive amnesty (1953–55) when many Soviet citizens, including those judged for collaboration, were subjected for release. Another part of the project is devoted to the so-called ‘second wave’ of collaborators' trials, which started in the late 1950s and continued until the late 1960s. The research focuses on Ukraine, Lithuania and Crimea as territories with a multinational population where, after World War II, the Soviet state intended, on the one hand, to fight strong nationalistic sentiments revealed during the war. On the other hand, it pursued justice by investigating Nazi crimes.

The changes in practices of judging collaborators illustrate the profound transformation of the Soviet system and the attitude of the government toward both the notion ‘collaboration’ and the crimes against the Jewish population.