De’Vonte Tinsley

De’Vonte is a first-year history Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on Modern Russian/Soviet history and is a Fontaine fellow and a recipient of the Ph.D. Presidential fellowship. De’Vonte’s initial research interest centered around the Russian Civil War and the establishment of Soviet Power as the Russian Imperial space collapsed. In particular, De’Vonte took a local approach to understanding the complicated dynamics of early Soviet power in Russia. His senior honors thesis focused on Dvinsk (Daugavpils) during the Russian Civil War, using the local newspaper Krasnoe znamia (Red Banner) to understand the particular problems facing the city and how they fit into the larger context of Revolution and Civil War. Now De’Vonte is focusing on a transnational study of the Soviet Union and Vietnam, with interests in the transfer of ideas from the USSR to Vietnamese revolutionaries, and how these ideas were transformed to fit Vietnamese conditions. De’Vonte hopes to not only look at the early relationship between Soviet and Vietnamese revolutionaries but also look at how Vietnamese Communists, despite their great reliance on the Soviet Union, managed to survive the collapse of world communism in 1991.