Episode 28: Oral Histories - Witness to Change

But in addition to it, coming back to your question about the work we do with the KGB archives, it's worth, of course, reflecting on that collaboration as well because it's extremely important piece of what we do.

The collection of the KGB documents that is hosted by our partner archives in Ukraine represents the largest post-Soviet KGB archival collection which exists in post-Soviet space apart from Russia.

Russia, of course, is inaccessible to us right now.

It is under the authoritarian regime of Putin.

No one can work in research there.

So Ukrainian archives, KGB files held in the state sectoral archive of the security services of Ukraine is now the focal point for many researchers around the world to come to and research Soviet history, Russian history, Georgian history, Armenian history, and so on and so, and of course, Ukrainian history.

So this is the place where, again, interactions and intersections of different fields emerge, where people come to pursue not just Ukrainian history, but other kinds of historical knowledge.

We also live in this unique age of major transformations when it comes to our academic life.

We are every day encountering new technologies which are offered to us by AI, by digital humanities on how we can pursue and follow on in our scholarship.

So we also wanted to capitalize on that.

So, so rather than simply going into the archives in Ukraine and simply pulling out the documents, making them available, translating them, making them accessible, for us it was also important to, in fact, focus theoretically and critically on the discourse of the archival files themselves.

So the language itself is what we're focusing on, uh, discursive construction, ideological layering, how and in what way we can discuss these unique tools, linguistic language tools, which were directly aimed to undermine and construct the enemy out of one nation or another, one minority of another.

So that's what academically we've done.

We've got SSHRC, wonderful funding from the federal government.

We also were supported by the Cool Institute for Advanced Studies, and we have bundled this funding to build this international partnership.

We have partners from United States, Harvard University, our very talented team of, uh, digital humanities folk who know how to work technically with all these works is housed in the University of Western Bohemia.

Of course, we have Ukrainian partners, and we also collaborate with Crimea Platform and with the Faculty of Native Studies as well as consultants on this project.

So it's very much of an ecosystem of research that different parts of it continue to inform, support, and enhance the other part.