Content Notice: This item discusses sexual violence.

Stefan Lacny, a former graduate student in the Department of Slavonic Studies at MMLL, has received the annual prize for Best Scholarly Article by a Postgraduate Student from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. 'Creating the Polish enemy on the Soviet screen, 1925-1939', in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 17(2), argues that the many Soviet films made on the so-called ‘Polish theme’ between 1925 and 1939 reveal a persistent Soviet anxiety towards Poland as a potential military and ideological threat to the USSR. Lacny shows how the films process this anxiety through highly gendered characterisations of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and through nationally specific representations of sexual violence. The article is open access.

Lacny's doctoral research examines Soviet cinematic depictions of Poles and Ukrainians from 1925 to 1941 in the context of the USSR's annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. Prior to his doctoral studies, which he completed in 2024, Lacny obtained a BA in MML (French and Russian) and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture from Cambridge.