Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History at the University of Padua, Italy. He has published works on the great famine in Kazakhstan of the 1930s, Tsarist policies in Central Asia, and forced migration in Eurasia. Prior to his current position, he taught at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. On the topic of the talk, he recently published “Opium Regimes of Imperial Collapse: The Russian Far East during the Civil War (1917-1922)”, Ab Imperio 3 (2021): 111-135 and “Illegal Markets and the Formation of a Central Asian Borderland: the Turkestan-Xinjiang Opium Trade (1881-1917)”, Modern Asian Studies 54/6 (2020): 1828-1875.