Oleg Lutohin has been a researcher at ZOiS since November 2024; prior to that he was a visiting researcher. From 2021 to 2022, he directed the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Museum at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg. Since 2016, he has developed a program of public activities for the Center as the head of the educational department. Since November 2022, with a scholarship from the international exchange programme Memory Work funded by the 'Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung', he interviewed museum professionals to understand how emotions convey nostalgia for the communist past in museum exhibitions in Russia and Germany. He continues his work as an independent researcher and museum administrator, focusing on the intersection of media, memory, and civic activism in post-socialist societies.

In his current project Protest vergessen?, he is investigating ways of preserving the collective memory of protests against socialist dictatorships in Eastern Bloc countries. The project includes in-depth interviews with witnesses of European democratic resistance and video collages created using generative AI models. These collages feature digitalised media documents from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, the Solidarity Centre in Gdansk, and other memorial institutions. This project aims to reactivate memories of the non-violent, successful struggle against dictatorship in today's polarised media landscape, addressing issues of authenticity and reliability of media documentation and archiving.