GRANTEE
As staff members of one Ukraine’s leading archives––the Central State Archive of Social Organizations (TsDAGO)––we are undertaking efforts to create a new archival collection of documents devoted to the current Russian-Ukrainian war. This effort is being undertaken by several of TsDAGO’s staff members who have remained at work in Kyiv. The collection will be formed from official documents of political parties and social movements from the wartime period, in addition to personal documents––diaries, memoirs, letters, drawings, flyers, photographs taken across different regions of Ukraine by civilian witnesses of Russia’s war of aggression. We believe that personal documents in particular will form an important source basis for future historians of the “history of everyday life.” Coming generations of scholars will be able to study this historical turning point through the prism of the daily experiences and emotions of ordinary people.
Unfortunately, most of the methods employed in peacetime to build a new archival repository are not available under the current conditions of war. We have begun to adopt new methods, including personal outreach and reliance on personal contacts, to adapt to the constraints of the present moment. Our new research methods include the monitoring of websites of state and public institutions, as well as of a range of social media, in order to form a comprehensive picture of ongoing events in their dynamic development.
Notwithstanding the multiple pressures of wartime, we are confident in the success and importance of our project. The end product of our efforts will be the creation of a separate archival repository (fond) within TsDAGO’s holdings, the digitization of all resources, and the creation of a web portal to make them available to researchers worldwide.
The importance of the creation of such a collection of documents is obvious to any historians, as the collection will become a critically important resource for the study of Ukrainian and global contemporary history.