A West Philly expert on Russia and Ukraine is now a social media celebrity

Like most middle schoolers stuck in the house on a sick day, Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon passed the time on the couch, binging TV shows.

She was 13 and living on her family’s cattle farm in rural Southeast Texas, and on that fateful day — the only sick day she’s ever taken — the History Channel’s Russia, Land of the Tsars changed her life. St. Julian-Varnon watched every episode. Five years later, she left Dayton, Texas, to focus on Slavic studies at Swarthmore, then went to Harvard to study Ukraine, and eventually to the University of Pennsylvania, where she’s a Ph.D. student studying Russian and Soviet Union history.

Recently, as threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin evolved into a full-on invasion of Ukraine, Twitter followers have looked to St. Julian-Varnon’s history-heavy feed as a way to wade through the rhetoric and misinformation.

“I went to sleep Sunday night and had 9,000 followers and woke up with 26,000,” she said Thursday before heading to a Slavic studies conference in Virginia. “Unfortunately, I’ve also been blocking people with reckless abandon.”

As of Friday afternoon, St. Julian-Varnon had more than 68,000 followers on Twitter.

St. Julian-Varnon, 32, of West Philly, spent time living in Odesa and Kyiv while studying Ukrainian history at Harvard. As a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white country, St. Julian-Varnon said she had some “not-so-fun moments” living in Ukraine, including a run-in with skinheads.

“I grew up Black in rural Texas. I was often the only Black student in classes and I grew up Catholic, when everyone else was Baptist,” she said. “There’s been a lot of layers of weirdness going on in my life.”

St. Julian-Varnon said she made lifelong friends in Ukraine too, all of them safe as of Thursday afternoon.

“I know a lot of worried people,” she said. “These are real people. This isn’t a game. There are human beings living in metro stations.”

History, she said, has already shown what a leader like Putin can do when his power goes unchecked. That’s why her head and her heart, and her tweets, are with Ukraine.

“People often now say, ‘How could people have watched Hitler do this or that in 1938, during his land invasions?’ ” she said. “This is that.”

Though she has not visited Russia, she has many Russian friends, and notes that the country is not a monolith. There are protesters denouncing Putin’s actions who face certain arrest or worse.

“I’m a first-in-family college student,” she said. “My dad is a Vietnam War vet and while my parents understand my interests, they do worry about it. They were really worried about me going to Russia and experiencing racist violence.”

Some online trolls have questioned her expertise.

“People like to believe I don’t know Russian or anything about the region because I’m Black,” she said. “They can’t put the two together.”

Just as her online following has grown, St. Julian-Varnon said the growth of “Google scholars” has, unfortunately, kept pace.

“There’s so many trolls and so many terrible takes,” she said. “There is some really scary stuff out there, like Tucker Carlson saying Putin is in the right. I never thought I would see the day when Republicans were praising a Russian president.”

St. Julian-Varnon worries President Joe Biden’s recent sanctions won’t be enough to turn back the Russians. American concerns about gas and food prices going up in the U.S. as a result of the conflict are valid, she said, but there are larger issues that trouble her.

“If you look at it on a human level, we are seeing a democratic country, striving to maintain its sovereignty, and it’s being invaded,” she said.

St. Julian-Varnon has had several television appearances in recent weeks and said she’s due to appear on MSNBC in coming days. Through it all, she’s still a student, living in the fluid moment when history is being made.

“It’s really blown up. I’m trying to inform as many people as I can,” she said of her following. “But I still have to read like four books a week.”