Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

As Russia's war on Ukraine grinds into its second year, we see no end to its devastation. Battlefield and civilian casualties mount at a horrifying pace as the millions who fled the conflict face indefinite and uncertain stays abroad. The invasion has altered societal and political fabrics across Eurasia and affected daily lives worldwide.

By comparison, the impact of the war on our field might appear trivial. Our lives as scholars as well as global citizens have all the same been transformed. Those of us who recall the excitement of the early 1990s, as the ex-USSR's archives and holdings opened to us, now confront an indefinite period of studying the region in a way that, on its face, resembles how things were done in Soviet times—at least with regards to the Russian Federation. In Ukraine, the main issue is the devastation of infrastructure—including archives, libraries, museums, and sites central to our ability to work as historians.¹ Researchers there face threats to life and limb as Russia targets civilian areas and unexploded ordnance mounts. Given the dangers and potential burden on the state, is this the time for historical research in Ukraine, especially for noncitizens? In other Eurasian states, from Kyrgyzstan to the Baltics, archives and libraries remain mostly accessible, although research conditions are shifting in some of these places as well. How do we, as historians of the region, engage with the costs of this conflict? How do we respond ethically to its human consequences, as global citizens and scholars, and interact with our friends and colleagues across Ukraine, Russia, and Eurasia? How do we navigate this changing research landscape and consider training a new generation of scholars?

Answers to these questions will be neither simple nor uniform. We face complicated choices. Kritika, alongside other journals and scholarly [End Page 239] organizations, hopes to facilitate dialogue and foster a sense of community at a time when the conflict adds to other pressures facing our field—from the ongoing job market crisis to legislation in some US states that amounts to outright censorship over what we teach. In subsequent issues of the journal, we will animate this conversation amid our new and challenging—some might say increasingly dystopian—environments. We can nonetheless face these challenges head-on. We can assist colleagues directly affected by Russia's invasion and become involved in humanitarian efforts. We can seize opportunities to advance regional histories through new methods and new pathways. We can consider the possibilities of researching in regions that remain open and safe to travel. In the Soviet period—and, for some historians, afterwards—it was considered acceptable to tell the story of the "periphery" from Leningrad/St. Petersburg and Moscow. Paradoxically, we now face a world where we may be driven to tell the stories of Russia and its outstretched imperial arms from Almaty, Tbilisi, Riga, and multiple other points. Of course, these cities and countries also have their own stories to tell, at once independent from and intertwined with Russia's history. We can strive to do all of this even as we hope—sometimes against hope—that the war will soon end, that its local and global implications can be minimized.

The Caucasus and Central Asia are now becoming newly popular research subjects, due both to access to resources and to the discourse of decolonization. It is not yet clear whether the numbers of Western, Russian, and Ukrainian scholars in the libraries and archives of these states will markedly increase, and what impact that might have on the study of history in these regions. What is clear is that the conflict has ushered in or exacerbated unstable environments, which cannot fail to affect scholarly work. Georgia, once considered a beacon of transparency and good governance, has witnessed massive protests in recent months. Its government, linked to the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has embraced Russian methods of controlling civil society as it moves Georgia farther from the dream of integration with the European Union. Foreign researchers there are finding themselves blocked from accessing collections at the national state archive, probably because of decisions made at its controlling agency, the Ministry of Justice, even as the former Communist Party and KGB archives remain largely open. Georgian colleagues express pessimism at the country's path. Uncertainty proliferates across the ex-Soviet sphere as hundreds of thousands of people from Russia and billions of rubles/dollars/euros seek new, safe havens. Inflation, rising housing costs, and the sounds of an imperial [End Page 240] language on the street accompany these new arrivals. A few seek to integrate into their adopted lands, while others see their situation as temporary exile and remain isolated. Central Asian and Caucasus governments also confront a complicated calculus on how to deal with Russia, China, the European Union, and the United States at a time of significant regional and global tensions.

We have heard stories of restricted access to archives and other resources from across the region. As in Georgia, they tend to be more sporadic and capricious than systemic. Some researchers get in; some do not. Sometimes the denial of permission is predictable, given the nature of a topic, which might be deemed politically sensitive; at other times the refusal of access is entirely unexpected. What stories can we tell with the access we now have? We have much to gain by closer inspection of Eurasia's diversity and building on a "transnational" and "transimperial" trend that has been evident in recent dissertations and published works on our areas of study.

How we study and engineer our gaze on Ukraine and Russia from surrounding states, all the while treating these on their own terms, presents manifold challenges. Archival collections in Soviet republics contain more than just Russian-language documents. As these collections grow primarily through acquisitions of material in national languages, the linguistic balance continues to shift. What might researchers miss or misunderstand if they can read only Russian-language sources? What might local newspapers and memoirs say that we cannot capture in Russian? In light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its continued incursions and interference into other countries of the region, and our own scholarly understandings of decolonization, what is the burden on researchers to use local and national languages in communication outside libraries and archives as well as to read in them within?

Being sensitive to our limitations and frank in recognizing them in our work, being ambitious enough to devote time and energy to studying national languages, working with local research teams—these and similar strategies can help us meet the challenges of this moment and can expand our historical reach at any time. We might also consider technological tools. How do we reckon with ever-improving translation apps and artificial intelligence?

The question remains, however: how will we work on Russia and Ukraine so long as we are unable or unwilling, given the many present risks, to travel there? Our senior colleagues who wrote dissertations in the [End Page 241] 1970s–80s often had the chance to do some—albeit highly circumscribed—research in Soviet archives and were able to visit Leningrad and Moscow, if not other places as well. Views from the "periphery" can be useful and timely but will get us only so far in the study of Russia, much less Ukraine. Our contacts with colleagues in Russia have also become—for various reasons—more limited. Consequently, academic consortiums in Europe and the United States have stepped in to keep research networks alive. George Washington University's Russia Program, for example, offers outreach to scholars in Russia who oppose the war and the opportunity for external researchers to engage in-country research assistants who are able to access Russian archives.² Questions of ethics, however, remain thorny. Do we risk placing people in danger? Do we indirectly legitimize Putin's regime by working with its institutions? The answers are not always up to us, because organizations and granting agencies also play roles in deciding how we might engage with Russia. In the case of Ukraine, of course, many foreign universities are hosting scholars-at-risk and others who have fled the conflict, all the while intensifying relationships with institutes of higher education in Ukraine itself. But do we place people in harm's way by asking them to research for us in-country, even as they might more than ever need financial resources?

Facing this new world demands cooperation and collegiality—both inside and outside circles of historians. We need to work with librarians, archivists, curators, and other scholars to locate, share, and publicize valuable troves of accessible primary sources and digitized materials—for example, the Digital Handbook for Research on Soviet History, developed by the Davis Center with support from Harvard University's History Department.³ All of us can think of source bodies beyond archives that have turned out to be richer than we expected. Much pioneering work has been, and continues to be, produced with sources that might be considered unorthodox. Our consideration of what constitutes a historical source is also ever expanding—from visual to aural as well as written.

We want to do our part to promote respectful conversations about how historians can ethically and logistically navigate contemporary research realities. In future issues, Kritika will publish a roundtable on the ethics of scholarly engagement with Russia in light of the war and a subsequent [End Page 242] one on the practicalities of doing Russian and Belarusian—and, for now, Ukrainian—history from the "other shore."

We will also be expanding our "Documents and Source Analysis" rubric and giving it a new name, "Sourcework." We invite scholars to offer pieces (contributions can be as short as 2,000–3,000 words) that feature close readings of individual or small groups of historical sources; explore new methodologies and methodological questions; and/or describe, in terms similar to an ethnography, the act of research and the role of the authorial self in archives, in oral interviews, on the street, and wherever our lives as historians take us. We want sources to be understood in the broadest sense: from songs to letters, from paintings to statistical tables, from visual to material culture. Our goal is simple: can we find opportunities for creative historiographical and methodological advancement amid new research constraints? Can we find ways to read both along and against the grain even the driest Soviet publications with new interpretive tools that allow innovative ways of seeing and understanding? These are hard tasks, for sure, but also necessary and potentially fertile ones. We invite you to share with us your ideas about how Kritika can help historians make sense of our current reality.