Meagan Ford is a fifth-year History and Russian Studies double major. Her research project is her senior thesis “From Nomads to ‘New Soviet Men’: The Urbanization of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 1937.” Alma-Ata was the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and experienced both great urban buildup and a staggering loss of human life under Stalin, whose system of mass terror reached its apex in 1937. One factor in this was the moving of mass numbers of traditionally nomadic Kazakhs into settled communities like Alma-Ata. Using archival documents from the Almaty (Alma-Ata) city archive in Kazakhstan, Meagan tells the story of how one state construction company, Alma-Ata Stroi, navigated competing demands and pressures by Moscow authorities and the realities of the attempts on the ground to complete its urbanizing mission.