Elina Galperin was born in Minsk, Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 2004, she attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she majored in History and Russian Studies. After finishing her senior thesis on the politics of education among the Kazakhs in the late Imperial period, she graduated in February 2008. In September 2010, she received a Masters of Arts Degree in History, having passed qualifying exams on the Russian and Ottoman empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. In September 2010, she began work as a PhD student in the history department with four fields: Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Mongol Empire.