Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on research

Russia’s full-scale full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the world’s landscape in many ways. The human, political, environmental, social, economic (and so on) costs of this act of aggression have been devastating. As many have experts have pointed out and has been well illustrated through some devastatingly impactful literature, Russia’s belligerence in the region is nothing new – Russia has been at war with Ukraine since 2014, and destructive warfare tactics have been trialled against Chechens, in Syria, and elsewhere for years.¹ One thing that has changed definitively since February 2022 has been the research landscape. As of September 2023, the situation is that archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are still open and functioning, but the risk to the scholar coming from abroad is such that these have been effectively off-limits for professional researchers seeking to carry out normal research activity. There are possibilities in terms of remote research, but the ideal situation of getting into the archive and doing your own digging is currently not a viable option. Access has been greatly limited to scholars based in the West since the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 onwards, but the war makes research access even more difficult. Furthermore, the war has become one of attrition and clearly will have consequences lasting for years. Even after the conflict ends – and it is far from certain how it ends – there will likely be suspicion, hostility and enmity that will make travel to archives awkward at least.

We are potentially looking at years of stymied archival access in Russia, Ukraine (where, more consequentially, archives might be destroyed), and Belarus, but there are other profound knock-on effects on the research landscape. Among these are that the risks of cooperation with colleagues in Russia are currently very great: beyond consulting papers and documents, usual forms of research cooperation, both informal and informal, are imperilled and this will clearly have a great impact on research in the next few years at least. The situation for scholars working in Russia is bleak, and the effects of the war will inhibit contact and networking with scholars based outside of the country, which has been highly beneficial to many research agendas in Russian history over the last few decades. There are many human stories behind the invasion, and there is no doubt that for a generation of researchers the key geostrategic issue of our time will bring seismic consequences, and these problems will be felt in many different research contexts and places.

I write this piece as part of a special journal forum on the impact these events will have on research, approaching it with a mixture of biographical and practical considerations in mind. What I intend to do below is note some of my personal experiences, mark out how people engaged in research in the field have been (or might) approach such problems, and, finally, think through some peculiar challenges in terms of my own special interest. In part my approach here is partly biographical, so what comes across is unfortunately Western-centred, but I am also attempting to think through, however tentatively, potential new or different ways of researching, and how we might go about doing research outside the archive and interpret underused resources, whilst not ignoring issues for the wider community. My primary field of interest is the history of Russia, particularly, the late imperial period (c. 1881–1917), so I write the following remarks with that in mind. I am not a Ukraine expert, where different challenges are being presented in terms of access to and storage of materials, although large-scale digitization projects are underway which will hopefully manage to mitigate some of the destruction of the rich historical sources there. Of course, this all pales into insignificance given the enormous human consequences of Russia’s invasion.

Have we been here before? A parallel that many have grasped for is to look back in time to how a previous generation working in the West with stymied archival access studied the Soviet Union, and often quite effectively. Sovietology in the early Cold War was dominated by paradigmatic thinking about the Soviet Union – was it an ‘evil empire’ or could other approaches explain this most peculiar feature of the geopolitical landscape? Up until the late 1970s virtually no one in the West had access to Soviet archives, and if they did, access was certainly privileged. What is more, restricted archival access stymied not just the study of the Soviet Union, but also that of imperial Russia. The experiences of individual researchers varied quite widely, and the entire way in which westerners could approach the study of the history of Russia from its earliest times was conditioned by the question of source access. It is common to look at the acknowledgements or methodology sections of research monographs produced until the early 1990s and note the researcher’s frustration at how they were allowed to consult only a portion of sources from the archives that they considered vital for their project. Therefore, it is not surprising that researchers sometimes did not base their projects on archives, knowing full well the limitations or obstacles they were likely to encounter, or used archives only as a supplement for materials that they could consult more freely, such as, for instance, the printed press or documentary collections. In hindsight, the relatively free – though by no means unproblematic – access enjoyed by researchers to the Russian Federation from the early 1990s until around the late 2010s might seem like a historical aberration, an unparalleled and not to be repeated period of latitude. Have we returned to a status quo we thought we might have left behind?

I would argue, certainly not – as I will attempt to explain, there are circumstances that make the 2020s very different from historical research in the late Cold War period. But it is immediately apparent that research has been hindered in many ways. My two major research projects to date have both relied on archive materials. Particularly my first book on the Russian radical right was an archival project in a way that I did not anticipate when I crafted a PhD application on the ‘ideology of Russian conservatives in the early twentieth century’ back in 2010. My initial goal was to study intellectual connections between populist and Slavophile thinkers and base the research largely off of printed texts – the Russian archives, which I anticipated as a titanic struggle that might be beyond my cerebral bounds, would be merely used to add a bit of surface gloss to the sources that would comprise my project. As it so happened, I came across a range of materials almost by accident whilst working in the Russian State Archive in Moscow (GARF) in 2012 and 2013 which changed my focus to look at the radical right that emerged around and following the 1905 revolution, which led to a different thesis and eventually a book that I did not plan on writing initially.

This personal experience suggests two difficulties. First, this serendipity – in the sense of being in a physical space like the archives, at least – could not happen nowadays, particularly thinking back to my own experiences as a slightly discombobulated PhD student. Wrestling with the archive guide (putevoditel’) in person and blundering around in the reading rooms made me the scholar I am now, for better or worse. Ten years on and I have a tranche of archive materials I have collected – I wish I had more – which I can put towards my current projects and use to fill in some gaps. Happily, a rule changed to allow the researcher to take photos in some Russian archives – bafflingly, provided the material was not on printed paper – and that allowed me to collect things at a rate that I couldn’t when I first started working and conditions were different. If this had happened to me several years previously I would no doubt be a different scholar to the one I am now, which leads me to my second point: the inequality resulting from this event. Especially for current PhD students and early career researchers, who are time limited in a way (some) more established scholars are not, the situation is especially far from ideal. Though everyone who works in the field has been affected, we have not been affected equally: I am particularly sympathetic to the challenges those at the earlier stages of the career are facing, and those who might not have the resources to overcome challenges easily, be they financial, institutional, or otherwise.

It goes without saying the invasion means certain types of resources not easy to consult – sadly, various good projects in a state of semi-completion will be left unfinished due to the war, shelved because of archives being off-limits. Looking at things more optimistically, there is still a lot that can be achieved. In my view, there are two main differences between the current state of play and 1970s Sovietology. The first is 50 years plus of scholarly innovation. In the interim period between then and now, we’ve had decades of outputs of solid research, monographs that draw on archive materials, syntheses, and document collections that collate archival holdings. To cite two examples of the latter, this includes major series like Yale’s ‘Annals of Communism’, and, on the Russian side, collections released by the publisher ROSSPEN that collect documents concerning major political parties from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s or so.² Whilst document collections by no means represent all the treasures of the archives that can be mined, there’s a lot more available nowadays, which will remain the case even if the archives are shut for the foreseeable future. The second is what primary resources are available to us, particularly via the internet, which has hugely simplified some research processes.

Evidently as a scholar thinking about these problems anyway, I have had several discussions with colleagues (primarily, I have been speaking to people working in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and the United States) in terms of how we might adapt to or overcome research challenges. Broadly speaking, I have found three different approaches to how people are dealing with the issue of no access to Russian archives and libraries. The first is that people might change their topic entirely – if I was to write, say, on the history of coffee, or Tottenham Hotspur football club, I might find a project that I was passionate about but could still probably research in a relatively unrestricted way. Though this does require a huge change in intellectual hinterland – particularly digesting a lot of secondary materials – I can think of colleagues who are doing or intend to do it. The second is to stick with a research area you are already interested in – in my case, the history of Russia – but change your timeframe to one where more sources can be consulted freely, which could be a tricky ask. The third is to change focus to other countries in the post-Soviet space outside of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. There is still potential to do much good research on, say, Central Asia, the Caucasus, or Finland, where archival access remains relatively open. This is something that several colleagues are doing, and it’s evident to me that some of the most innovative work from a younger generation is coming from the study of these regions, where theoretical and conceptual approaches of different types can be supported by solid fieldwork. It also seems somewhat fitting to shift focus away from Russia itself, or the centre, towards the periphery, or the countries surrounding it.

On the third point, it's worth thinking about what places we can work in. The Russian empire was a vast space that encompassed many different territories in parts of the former Russian empire, some of them primarily non-Russian. I have experience of using libraries and archives in Finland in particular. Helsinki has extraordinary value as a place to do research on the Russian empire, and the Slavonic library has exceptional range in the study of the region. Many of the materials on the late imperial period are in Russian and collected in good order. Just down the road in the city centre, the materials in the National Archives are organized and easy to get access to – a definite plus. This includes the collections of the State Chancellery archive, providing many details of life in the Grand Duchy of Finland under Russian governance. Such materials are certainly easier to use and more accessible than any repository I have come across in the Russian Federation: last year it took 20 minutes to deliver archive sources I had ordered for use in the reading room. The archives have also acquired primary sources from Russian archives in Moscow and St Petersburg over the past several decades, which can help with consulting materials. The collections include those of major royals like Nicholas II, though, curiously, one must have a Finnish bank account code to access the collections (!) which can make things awkward.

Additionally, the Baltic states are valuable sources of material, each with its own national archives and libraries, and archivists are often happy to help researchers unearth the less appealing aspects of the Soviet period. Much scope remains for exceptional work on many aspects of Soviet policy and life, and domestic researchers often shy away from the period, which leaves the floor quite open.

Looking closer to home, as a UK-based scholar it’s notable that there is a lot of material you can access in some of the larger repositories in the country. I work primarily in the south of England and slightly further away from my home institution there are the major research libraries in London like the British Library or the archives of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. Among other things, these hold major collections of late imperial newspapers on microfilm, as well as strong collections of books from the same period, including many published materials from revolutionary groups.³

Much more is now available close to hand due to improvements in technology, particularly via the internet. Given the distance of the late imperial period from the present, more materials are in the public domain than some areas of recent history – and hence free from copyright restrictions. There are guides for what can be found online appearing – one example is the so-called ‘Cyber Leninka’ which aggregates various online holdings – and digitization has now been going on for quite a long time. There are many books, newspapers, journals and even some archival materials available in the public domain.⁴ For those who can read Russian, the online resources of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library (St Petersburg), State Public Historical Library (Moscow), Russian National Library (St Petersburg), and the Russian State Library (Moscow) are all helpful tools and resources.⁵ Concerning source materials, the situation with books is probably the best of all these types – a lot of interesting and useful materials have been digitized, and the online collections of the major and sometimes smaller Russian libraries present a lot of sources on a huge range of topics. These now include various collections from different regions – recently I had some success utilizing the extensive digitized materials held by Tomsk State University, which includes fairly complete runs of newspapers and journals produced in Siberia, like The Tomsk Sheet (Tomskii listok, 1895-7) and Siberian Life (Sibirskaia zhizn’, 1897–1919).⁶ Quite often, improvements in technology mean these are more readable than ever before – though some remain inaccessibly grainy, many uploaded books and journals are now preserved in good condition and can be scanned or screenshotted to the reader’s content, safe in the knowledge they will be readable later!

Newspapers have somewhat lagged due to difficulties in reproducing these online, but they are catching up and some centres host their own source collections.⁷ The website of the State Public Historical Library presents good resources of newspapers, journals, and serial publications. This includes some of the most well-known and widely circulating newspapers from the late imperial era, including a few years’ worth of The New Times (Novoe vremia), Birzhevye vedomosti (The Stock Exchange News) and Speech (Rech’), as well as some more obscure materials that are worthy of further scrutiny.⁸ The provincial press is a perennially under-used resource, and the current situation might force that situation to change, given what is now available online, on major websites like those listed above as well as the more intermittent collections of Russian newspapers.⁹ Preservation of newspapers has in the past been almost comically poor – again, technological issues here – but things seem to be improving steadily. One should note though that oftentimes a print run is incomplete, and even professional digitization projects like East View can be missing issues.¹⁰ Depending on one’s chosen subject, it should still be possible to base some articles or chapters off a close reading of the printed press – there are shortfalls here like availability of different titles and incomplete print runs, but an approach that crosshatches digital materials including the press as well as books can yield reward.

Additionally, one can add to these assessments with a close and critical reading of document collections that collate archive materials. These cover large periods of Russian and Soviet history, for instance, those hosted on the Electronic Library of Historical Documents (Elektronnaia biblioteka istoricheskikh dokumentov) from the Russian Historical Society which aggregate collections from broad historical timeframes.¹¹ Many releases from within Russia itself over the past few decades republish collections of primary sources, and some gather documents from archives, such as the aforementioned ROSSPEN collections including its series on political parties before 1917; nowadays, additional collections follow a thematic bent, exploring (for instance) power, society or economic history. Many documentary collections are available in their full runs in libraries outside of Russia, including some prestigious titles like The Red Archive (Krasnyi arkhiv) or Prisons and Exile (Katorga i ssylka), and increasingly these can be consulted online too.¹²

Many of these remarks also pertain to research libraries and repositories in the UK. More archive materials can be consulted online: this is a result of extensive digitization processes, and printed and otherwise archive guides can be consulted to find things. One example I have been exploring quite recently for my current book project on martyr cults in late imperial Russia has been the holdings of the Provisional Government concerning the organization of funerals in Mars Field in March 1917, originally stored in GARF but now available via the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. For some collections, the titles and description – if not the sources – have been translated into English.¹³ A good number of documents from these collections are available online in good order. Even if Russia were open these could save on visits, so it is in some ways a more efficient way of doing research than in the days of relatively free access, though the process of serendipity can be lost with the material at your fingertips in this way.

Of course, certain source materials have their own strengths and weaknesses. Concerning newspapers, for instance, there are often limitations in terms of the information published – like any sources they are not all-inclusive but point to the subjectivities of their creators, and it might be some material is missing, or incorrect. But they do provide a lot of rich content – anyone who has used runs of newspapers in their own research will be familiar with an at times broad coverage of a gamut of political, social, cultural (and so on) issues, and especially from 1905–17 they benefitted from relatively lax censorship. Archive materials in document collections or online can be used to crosshatch the missing material within late imperial newspapers, or to provide a different view: source genres used in combination can provide fuller and more satisfying answers to historical questions.

There are certain subjects that will be more readily affected than others by the restricted access to archives. Certain projects in social history – especially where most of the events occurred in Russia itself – are likely to be more stymied than some works in intellectual history given their necessary focus on day-to-day life which often need documents emanating from certain institutions. It would be difficult to reconstruct a day-to-day project based around a close reading of sources concerning say, the late imperial bathhouse or the pharmacy without archive access, as the archives usually help a great deal to reconstruct the institutional processes that indelibly affect daily living. Wider society has been a fruitful area of research for a long time now and has helped push back against wider narratives of Soviet/Russian totalitarianism that can stress the biographies of great/evil men. The knock-on effect of this is that it is likely to change the landscape in terms of what projects researchers are likely to take on for the foreseeable future. Available document collections, source readers, the daily press, and other materials are likely to contribute to a picture of what is going on, but only to such an extent. In contrast, some projects that rely on readily available materials on perhaps high politics or intellectuals where materials are likely to be published could be easier to research and complete. The balance between exciting research questions and a feasible source base has always been a tricky act, and this is likely to continue.

For my part, I will be looking into the potential of online sources for my current projects and am probably in a position where I can complete them satisfactorily without more archive material, which is a relatively lucky position to be in. But the question of a substantive new project – still a long way off, as I have plenty to do on my current book and a journal special issue – has certainly given me pause. There’s potential that I might look at something with a more contemporary bent, and I am turning my attention to co-writing a textbook: for both projects, source availability is a key question and will be shaping my approach. Concerning the latter, it seems the right moment to start a project which is more of a synthesis, though we have other reasons to approach that project currently.

Thinking more widely, a judicious selection of topics and careful steering by PhD supervisors could ensure that good work on Russia can still be produced. There is now more material out there, particularly through the internet, and more than 50 years of scholarship that synthesizes and provides new interpretations. It can be difficult to keep up with the torrents of material that pour forth from online, and some of the websites hosting materials are of dubious quality. Even if one were to choose a more ‘conventional’ project – and I would argue that political history and biography can be innovative in many ways, it’s primarily a question of how one approaches the topic – it would be written in a new and different way, perhaps integrating new research pathways in, for instance, a developed historiography surrounding emotions or sexuality. In due course, new political theories will doubtless emerge and these will mean fresh approaches can be applied.

I have approached this piece largely in a biographical vein as someone working in a UK research context, but at the end I want to return to two bigger issues posed to the wider scholarly community. The first is the impact on colleagues in Russia. Many of these pertain to the wider hinterland and the discussions – sometimes informal – that influence research agendas. Thinking about Russian history, networking and scholarly exchange with colleagues working in the Russian Federation has undoubtedly been beneficial to the profession. In my own experience there was a trend for younger scholars working in Russia to travel to Western conferences and share their research – it’s tragic that this positive trend has been curtailed, and one can only hope it is resumed at some stage, though much potential still exists for online collaboration. There has clearly been a pattern with knowledge-rich, ambitious young Russians – including those working in academia – attempting to leave the country to get around some of these problems. Again, this will bring its own impacts in terms of how research agendas and processes change and function. Thinking about the international scholarly community, the impact of the invasion will be felt most keenly on those working in the Russian Federation, where risks are greater concerning what research can be carried out and when. Our dialogues and discussions with colleagues working in Russia face all sorts of problems, which will carry wider implications than what documents we can read and where, or what projects researchers working outside of Russia are likely to undertake.

The second point is primarily an ethical issue for the outsider, which is how we engage with Putin’s Russia. Some of this links into the engagement concerning colleagues that I mention above. There’s the thorny problem of who supports the invasion in Russia – the private views of individuals are of course a very different matter (and much more varied) than the stance of institutions, most of which, totally unsurprisingly, have followed the official line and supported the war. Even accounting for the invasion’s stymying effects concerning travel, online conferences mean it is possible to engage with Russians to a greater extent than before, some of whom will follow the official line; there will be other times things are opaque. Another issue connects to the country itself and enthusiasm over studying it. Some of this is reminiscent of the discourses concerning the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ – naturally this had an impact on how Westerners engaged with Russian history and society. My PhD supervisor noted of his own experiences working in Leningrad in the early 1980s, ‘we were, after all, working on (and in) a country that could launch nuclear weapons against us and which severely limited the freedoms of its own people. That, I think, produced a certain scepticism towards the place and its history’.¹⁴ Some of these issues are apparent once again given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its violation of the norms of international behaviour. It is a fair question whether it is appropriate to be positive about Russia’s history and its potential at various stages – those who have taken a more optimistic stance are at the very least in a difficult position nowadays. Study of Russia and its history will have to prompt a certain ambivalence: is it ‘know your enemy’ all over again?

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George Gilbert

George Gilbert is lecturer in modern Russian history at the University of Southampton, UK. Publications include The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland (Routledge, 2016), and, as editor, Reading Russian Sources (Routledge, 2020). His current research project explores martyr cults in the late imperial period, looking at these across the entire political and social spectrum. He is co-director of the Centre for East European and Eurasian Studies (CEEES) аt Southampton and is on the editorial board of the journal The Slavonic and East European Review.

Notes

1 Particularly, I am thinking of Kromeychuk, The Death of a Soldier.

2 Yale’s 22-item series is listed here: https://www.jstor.org/bookseries/j.ctt13kh1hd; ROSSPEN’s series “Russian Political Parties” can be seen at https://rosspen.su/katalog/politicheskie-partii-rossii-konets-xix-pervaya-tret-hh-veka-dokumentalnoe-nasledie-/. The latter is one of many series of document collections gathered by this publisher.

3 A short guide shows some materials from the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian collections at the British Library, London, UK: https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/russian-ukrainian-and-belarusian-collections.

4 https://cyberleninka.ru.

5 An example is the electronic collections of the Russian State Library (often called the Lenin Library) in Moscow: other resources are cited below. “Elektronnaia biblioteka”. http://elibrary.rsl.ru.

6 Tomsk State University website: https://www.lib.tsu.ru/ru.

7 Another example is the website of the Centre for Social and Political History: http://test7.dlibrary.org/ru/nodes/4-kollektsii-tsspi.

8 State Public Historical Library, Moscow, “The Periodical Press”. http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/10187-periodicheskie-izdaniya.

9 The catalogue of the Russian National Library, St Petersburg includes a facility to search what newspapers are available on any given day when selecting a month/year: https://primo.nlr.ru/primo-explore/jsearch?vid=07NLR_VU1&year=1903.

10 See for instance their newspapers at https://www.eastview.com/resources/newspapers/.

11 http://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/1-glavnaya.

12 E.g., https://istmat.org/node/31113.

13 “The Ceremonial Funeral of the Victims of Revolution.” https://www.prlib.ru/en/section/683289.

14 Conversation with Peter Waldron, 21 July 2023.