Participants

Discussion

This round table introduces a new international partnership that seeks to rethink how scholars read, analyze, and interpret Soviet secret police archives. At its center are the KGB files documenting the surveillance and repression of the Crimean Tatars and other Indigenous peoples of Crimea between 1944 and 1991. These files reveal not only the mechanisms of persecution but also the ideological language that framed an entire people as “enemies of the state.” Our project argues that this language—layered, coded, and deliberately misleading—constitutes both an obstacle and an opportunity: without careful analysis, it risks reproducing the very biases it was designed to enforce; with new methodologies, it can be “undone” to uncover deeper meanings.

The partnership brings together nine institutions from Canada, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and the United States, working across history, archival studies, computer science, and digital humanities. Round table participants will discuss how we combine digitization, metadata, and AI-assisted analysis with ethical and decolonial frameworks to address the epistemic and political challenges posed by these archives. We will reflect on issues of provenance, data integrity, and Indigenous knowledge sovereignty, as well as the geopolitical obstacles of working with sensitive archives in wartime Ukraine.

By situating the Crimean Tatar experience within wider debates on archival justice, repression, and Indigenous studies, the round table highlights both the methodological innovations and the ethical responsibilities of engaging with Soviet archives today.