Our archives and libraries series is back with new interviews related to digital primary source collections, as well as with archivists and librarians who manage underused collections related to Eastern European and Eurasian history.
For the first instalment of the rebooted series, Peripheral Histories? editor Siobhán Hearne spoke with Ivanna Cherchovych, the head of educational projects at the Lviv Centre for Urban History and an expert in women’s history, historical anthropology, and the history of everyday life in Galicia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ivanna and her colleagues are responsible for the development of REESOURCES: a digital platform which aims to decentralize the teaching of Eastern European history through providing new primary sources, challenging established grand narratives, and developing new approaches to teaching and learning. In this interview, you can learn all about the development of REESOURCES and how the platform can be used for researching and teaching the history of Eastern Europe.
How did your team form and how did you come up with the idea for REESOURCES?
Educational projects have always been the focus of the Center for Urban History's initiatives, primarily through summer schools, which we have been holding annually since 2010, courses, and our public discussion series programs. Therefore, for us, as an academic research institution with its own archive, the creation of an educational platform was a logical step: on the one hand, the embodiment of previous work the Center had done in this direction, and on the other, a manifestation of the desire to continue developing. The conversations about developing a resource for teaching Eastern Europe started in 2018 with a seminar organized by Sofia Dyak and Mayhill Fowler at the Center. When the world was hit by the pandemic in 2020 and we were all quarantined for a long time, we recorded our first online courses. Since then, the idea of creating a platform has been conceptualized and implemented in a series of concrete steps, both big and small.
A powerful push that accelerated our efforts to create the platform was Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the realization that there may never be a better time to put these ideas into practice. We decided to focus on developing educational materials for university teaching and invited researchers from partner institutions and universities whose professional interest lies in East European Studies to share their needs with us. We started working in three thematic groups, gathered around pre-selected research topics that later became the platform's focus themes: Gender, Displacement, and Industry. Our first working meeting occurred in March 2022, a month after the start of the full-scale war. We organized Zoom meetings and talked about the future platform as our office building in Lviv was being transformed into a shelter for refugees from different parts of Ukraine fleeing the Russian army. The crowdsourced nature of this project grew out of these meetings, as the first sources that appeared on the platform were those shared with us by the participants of the aforementioned working groups: Sofia Dyak, Mayhill Fowler, Anna Muller, Vladyslava Moskalets, Oksana Dudko, Martin Rohde, Julia Malitska, Orysia Kulyk, Katherine Zubovich, Olena Betlii, Iryna Sklokina, Oleksii Chebotarov. Over time, the platform acquired its own name REESOURCES. Rethinking Eastern Europe.
What are the aims of the project?
The first issue that those who teach Eastern Europe raised with us was about the availability of primary sources. The lack of historical sources translated into English from local archives, written in many local languages of this multilingual region, is the most frequently mentioned challenge posed to teaching and learning about Eastern Europe in the West. Therefore, one of the goals of the platform is to translate primary sources into English, and thus to represent and make available to a wide readership the multivocality of this region in order to generate a better understanding of the people and communities that lived here once or live here now. At the same time, it is important for us to make historical documents from other East European languages available to Ukrainian users as well. We translate documents not only from Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, German, Belarusian, or other languages into English, but also from Polish, Yiddish, German, etc. into Ukrainian. We publish primary sources on the platform along with a commentary by the researcher who shared the source with us and therefore can comprehensively contextualize it. This contextualization of the primary sources published on REESOURCES is an essential element of our source collection.
With this project, we also want to think together about the current challenges of East European studies, decolonization, and changing approaches to creating knowledge about this region. Through a critical reading of primary sources, the emergence of a variety of new research approaches, and dialogue between different academies, we hope to rethink and decentralize teaching on East European studies and enrich it with new scholarly meanings. REESOURCES is intended to become a platform for such discussions, a contact and translation zone combining Mary Louise Pratt’s and Emily Apter’s definitions, as an area of intense interaction across languages, academies, and teaching practices.
How do you choose the sources for the platform? Are there any particular groups or viewpoints that you look to represent?
Since the Center's academic interests focus on modern Europe, we limited the selection of materials for the platform to the period from between the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. We have thematic collections that fall within the broader research agenda of the Center for Urban History, covering topics related to the development of and urban life within the cities of Central and Eastern Europe, including their spatial, social and cultural transformations and everyday practices. Our work is interdisciplinary and aims to foster communication between history, sociology, urban studies, the history of architecture, visual studies, and digital humanities. Therefore, the sources we collect may be relevant to each of these disciplines.
In selecting sources, we are particularly interested in peripheral, underrepresented, or overlooked experiences. For example, this letter from a Soviet sixth-grader and Komsomol member Evgenia Kraidman, written to Lazar Kaganovich right after World War II. Or this essay by Israel Joshua Singer, a Polish writer who wrote in Yiddish, based on his visit to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Or the opinions of workers of industrial enterprises and mines in the Ukrainian SSR on Joseph Stalin's article “Dizzy with Success”, which were expressed in private conversations. Snippets of these conversations were collected by Soviet secret intelligence agents and reproduced in reports. These materials were declassified after the collapse of the Soviet Union and after Ukraine gained its independence.
The materials of the Center's Urban Media Archive (UMA) form the basis of REESOURCES’s collection of visual primary sources. Since the goal of the Media Archive is to collect, store, make available, and popularize materials that are often overlooked by state archives, its collections are often unique. For example, we have a large collection of Soviet amateur films. We published one of these films on the platform along with a research commentary. Shot in the early 1980s, this 12-minute film tells the story of the Bilka River through the eyes of a young girl who describes how her life changed when the river’s natural course was altered for irrigation in rural industry. The environmental theme, chosen by the Lviv filmmaker Roman Buchko, was one of the popular cinematic tropes of the late Soviet era and one of the few themes through which critique of the state and system could be expressed by Soviet citizens.
The REESOURCES primary sources also include materials from Center’s oral history collections. For example, interviews with Euromaidan participants collected during the winter of 2013 and spring of 2014, or interviews with representatives of the creative, administrative, and technical staff of Soviet Lviv theaters, recorded from 2011 to 2014.
The ‘peripheral’ nature of some topics obviously does not always mean that the sources dedicated to them have to be inaccessible. We publish not only little-known archival materials but also materials that have been published but have not yet been translated into English and, thus, have rarely been used in teaching.
Are there any hidden gems in the collection that surprised you that you were not expecting to find?
I come across such findings every time I read the modules or watch online courses, or look through syllabi, prepared by the researchers who are co-creating REESOURCES. Each of the five key formats by which we organize materials on the platform is designed around primary sources. For example, the structure of our modules includes a certain list of sources selected by the author to cover their topic. For me personally, the way each author works with the sources in their research, what questions they ask them, and which methodologies they employ in order to unpack these sources, especially for those who may not be familiar with that kind of material, is the most interesting part. With REESOURCES’ project, we did not only want to create a repository of primary sources and research on various topics related to modern Eastern European history and culture prepared in the form of educational materials for students, but also a tool for developing teaching techniques and sharing them among those who work on the region.
What is the state of digitalisation when it comes to archival materials on Eastern Europe? What do you think are the prospects for online accessibility of archival sources in the field?
This is very much dependent on the state policies of each country that makes up this region. When it comes to Ukrainian archives, much work is now being done to digitize and make archival documents more accessible to the public. This, of course, does not negate the fact that a lot of work lies ahead of us. The urgency of this work is very much dictated by the war. In March 2022, Russian soldiers destroyed the Security Service Archive in the Chernihiv region. Many archival buildings across the country have been damaged.
According to the State Archival Service, as of 1 January 2024, state archives digitized 3.5% of documents and 47% of case records for documents of the National Archival Fond that are stored in 7 central state archives of Ukraine and 25 state archives of regions and Kyiv. To provide some examples, early in 2024, the State Archive of Lviv Oblast posted more than 6000 archival documents on the history of city buildings from 1826-1941, greatly simplifying research not only for architects and historians of architecture, but also creating the possibility of using these sources in teaching. Another example is the digital memory storageproject of the Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. There are also many initiatives led by NGOs that are doing archival work. For instance, as online archive of photographs of Ukrainian forced laborers in Germany during World War II created by After Silence, a public organization that works in the field of memory studies and public history.
The REESOURCES’s list of recommendations for archival, research, and educational digital projects focusing on Eastern Europe is constantly growing.
Does your project engage in any public outreach activities?
Since we launched the platform about a year ago, our project has been in the active phase of collecting and developing materials to cover all the themes that we have decided to concentrate on. We devote our efforts to working with new authors and enriching the list of the platform’s propositions. However, we are striving to communicate with different audiences and be open to various kinds of corporations. This year, the Center partners with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University in organizing a series of online workshops with teachers of American high schools to design a Curriculum Development Project "On Ukraine,” based on REESOURCES materials. The result of this series will be presented at the final workshop in Boston this November.
Is there anything you wish more people knew about your project?
I would like to invite researchers and educators to join us in co-creating this project, to become authors or use existing materials with their students, share feedback with us on what is working and what is not, and what can be done differently. This will really help us to improve the platform and make it more user-friendly. Most platform materials are accessible without registration. To be able to take online courses, leave comments, and take private notes, users need to register on the platform. Registration is completely free. We adhere to the Creative Commons license for the use of copyright objects (CC BY-NC-ND). It means we allow users to upload content and share it with others as long as they give credit to the authors and copyright holders and do not use these materials for commercial purposes.
Thank you, Ivanna! The Peripheral Histories? editorial collective strongly encourage our readers to submit primary sources to the REESOURCES platform and become an author, or to use the platform in their teaching.