Jelena Jurjevna Guskova née Derjabina was born on 23 September 1949 in Moscow. In 1972, she graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University at the Department of History of Southern and Western Slavs. At the same faculty, she received her master's degree in the thesis on the socio-economic development of Serbia in the middle of the 19th century. There, in 1990, she defended her doctoral dissertation on socio-political organizations and the self-governing system of the SFRY.
In 1994, she worked as a scientific expert on the Balkans at the UN peacekeeping headquarters in the former Yugoslavia in Zagreb. From 1972 to 2002, she worked at the Institute of Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a leading research associate, and at the same time, she worked at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences as the head of the Center for Contemporary Balkan Crisis. He has been working at that Institute continuously since 2002 as a manager.
Jelena Guskova has lectured at Lomonosov Moscow State University (1993, 1995, 1998, 2001 and 2003), Irkutsk State University (1993), Perm State University (1995), the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2002), the Ural State University. University (2005) and the State University of Humanities of the Russian Academy of Sciences (currently). All her past and present lectures were dedicated to the history of Yugoslavia. Historiographically, she studied the opportunities and troubles in the Balkans during the second half of the 20th century, general disagreements in multinational states, interstate relations, Russia's foreign policy towards the Balkans, etc.
