Call for Contributions
Terms have ended in many countries, many student papers have been marked, committee activity is less relentless – time to get to what we love most: Research! If you are travelling to consult archives...
Verschlagwortet: Blog
Work(ers) in the Archive. A Conversation
Jonathan Raspe (JR): Alex, how did you become interested in Soviet workers? Your first book focused on sexual violence in late Imperial Russia—a very different topic, it would seem. Alexandra Oberländer (AO): My entirely...
How to Look at File Photographs: Archive, Optical Citizenship, and Documentary Art
How are film and photographic documents produced by various repressive regimes used in their own context and later reinterpreted? As a researcher in visual studies, I analyze archives and their evolution somewhat differently than...
The Citizen, the Letter, and the Archives of Soviet Georgia
In the spring of 2025, while preparing an application for participation in the BASEES conference in London, I found myself—as is often the case at such junctures—reflecting on whether I had produced any recent...
Historiographical Tensions in Historical Repositories: Exploring the Epistemologies of the Lithuanian Special Archives
Efforts to consolidate and reorganize archival landscapes often pose the risk not only of undermining archival integrity, but, more significantly, of serving as a historiographical intervention aimed at marginalizing inconvenient or unwelcome histories…
A Small Mosque and the Big Russian Archive: Towards a Postcolonial History of Knowledge Production
Like some colleagues, I have conducted research not only in the Russian capitals, but also in the multiethnic Volga provinces.[1] But it was in the Caucasus that I truly grasped the extent to which...
Against the Archival Grain? Repositories of Knowledge and the Decolonization of post-Soviet (Eurasian) History
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Western historians of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union have wondered how to continue research. Since the “archival revolution” of the early 1990s, we regularly worked...
Mehr als ‘personenbezogene Dokumente’ – Interview mit Dmitri Stratievski zum Projekt ‘Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene’
Das Projekt „Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene“ hat in den letzten Jahren umfassende Daten gesammelt zum Schicksal in deutsche Kriegsgefangenschaft geratener Angehöriger der Roten Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Kannst Du die Ziele dieser Arbeit kurz umreißen? U…
Das ehemalige KGB-Archiv der Litauischen SSR: Art und Menge von Dokumenten, deren Nutzung
Im ehemaligen KGB-Archiv der Litauischen SSR (das heute als Litauisches Sonderarchiv geführt wird) werden Dokumente von einzigartigem historischen Wert aufbewahrt. Diese zeigen Zielstellung, Struktur und Methoden des sowjetischen Repressionsapparats. A…
History of Science, decentralised. A guide to archival and library research in Georgia and Armenia
When I started applying for a doctoral scholarship roughly a year ago, I was often asked the same question: You indent to write a history of Soviet science. But given the fact that you...
Understanding the Colonial Funds of the Central State Archive of Kazakhstan
The Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan (TsGA RK) in Almaty is one of the most significant archival repositories in Central Asia. The archive was established in 1921 in Orenburg, and since...
Exploring Environmental History of Ukraine during the War: Selected Sources and Historiographical Overview
Before Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began on February 22, 2022, the environmental history of Ukraine was a relatively underexplored field for Western scholars. Most studies of territories formerly part of the Russian Empire...
Doing research (not only) on maritime history in Georgia. A practical guide to the National Archive in Georgia and the Adjara Archive
I was meant to depart for a lengthy research stay in Vladivostok on 3 March 2022. For my habilitation (aka the second book necessary to qualify for a professorship in Germany), I had started...
The “interplay of scales” in a de-imperial perspective: From Moscow to Riga and beyond
A change of location dictated by practical and ethical reasons In January 2024, I flew to Riga. I knew little about Latvia at the time — although I had just begun to learn Latvian...
Centering Kazakhstan: An environmental historian’s move beyond the ‘periphery’
For the past 15 years, I have been immersed in the study of Kazakhstan’s history. What began as a study of Soviet developmental policies in the “periphery” has evolved into an examination of national...
Investigating the Disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea: On Environmental History between Archival and ‘Place-based’ Research
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 occurred just as I was about to begin field research on a new book about the causes and consequences of the retreat of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. ...
Writing empire with natural archives
Might the new archival landscape that has emerged as a by-product of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine invite fresh perspectives on the types of sources that historians consider central to our discipline? In the...
