The race to rescue archival documents in Ukraine
A recent blog post on the History Workshop website by Ukrainian historian Dr Olena Styazhkina tells the story of a vital collaboration with an Oxford Professor of Russian, funded by the John Fell Fund.
Dr Styazhkina worked with Oxford's Professor Polly Jones and Sheffield's Dr Miriam Dobson to rescue vital documents which were threatened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
She wrote: "Just before the war broke out, we had started collaborating together on a research project exploring the social history of the Soviet 101st kilometre — a symbol of repressive geography in the Soviet Union. The project will explore how the introduction of internal passports in the 1930s accelerated the formation of zones of privilege and of punishment. Those the state considered ‘undesirable’ were denied the paperwork they needed to live legally in the city and its surrounding hinterland. Just outside this prohibited zone, outcast communities formed on what came to be known as the 101st kilometre."
Dr Styazhkina added: "Polly and Miriam wrote to us in the first days of war to say that the project (if successful) would only start in 2023, but that for now we could and should try to save the documents. Or was it mainly to save us? The main task was to examine the 101st kilometre in Ukraine, and from the very start: the 1920s. To write an article about it. To work together as historians and researchers. Tamara [Vronska, Dr Styazhkina's colleague] and I gathered these archives and filled in the gaps. We could see new topics and new questions: about the people who’d been banished, about whether they could or couldn’t return, about how the regime geography swept in waves across social and national groups [...] On March 25th, when a Russian rocket burned down the Chernihiv archive, the frontline shifted toward those papers, documents and ideas that needed to be saved. It turned out that this too fitted perfectly in the formula from the first days of the war: ‘to die with dignity and leave a memory’.
You can read the full, gripping blog post (which was also translated by Professor Jones) here.
Professor Jones now plans to carry out further research on Ukraine’s threatened heritage with her co-authors. Their first co-authored academic article from the project has now been submitted for publication, and Dr Styazhkina will hold a 'virtual fellowship' in the faculties of History and Modern Languages in 2022-23.
Image: Extract from the protocol of the OGPU (Secret Police) Special Board, 2 November 1928. Credit: Olena Styazhkina
