Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked the end of the post-Soviet condition that had dragged on for three decades. The entire period since 1991 (and even earlier) was accompanied by the trauma of war and refugedom, but even the bloodiest conflicts were either domestic in nature or a matter of disputed border regions. For the first time we are encountering the prospect of a whole country’s annihilation for the sake of overcoming a post-Soviet deadlock – the lack of a vision for a new society that would be fully independent of its past. In the hope of postponing the solution to this problem by enslaving Ukraine, the Russian Federation is physically destroying itself as a polity – along with the loathed post-Soviet indeterminacy. A conscious embrace of the Nazi (national-imperialist) scenario seems preferable due to the alleged existential authenticity of the cult of death and murder in the name of a homogeneous national body – compared to the amorphousness of postmodernist tolerance and multiculturalism.
This is why the wave of refugees from Ukraine and Russia that arose on February 24, 2022, has been unprecedented since 1917. Ukraine and Russia will not be the same countries; people take with them into exile not only memories of their past lives but also fragments of their former countries. This is no longer individual emigration, but a mass exodus of refugees from a perishing society. This refugee experience is comparable only with the postrevolutionary emigration, and it must be preserved for history.
Equally unique since the mid-1940s is the experience of life under occupation, be it on the territory of Ukraine subjected to Russia’s invasion or in the Russian Federation itself. For years, many Russian citizens in Chechnya and elsewhere who are unable to emigrate have felt as though they are living under the rule of an occupation regime. In the twenty-first century, attitudes toward the inhabitants of the occupied territories are no different from Stalinist-era stigmatization: they are suspected of treason and they are denied empathy. People in the occupied territories face the dilemma of making compromises for the sake of physical survival. The moral limits of such compromises – a problem as acute today as it was in the 1940s. Their traumatic experience also deserves to be preserved.
Unfortunately, wars have been perpetual during all these years in the post-Soviet space. Since February 2022, we are observing largely the same culture as in Georgia in 1991–1993 (and in 2008), in Chechnya and Karabakh, in Moldova and Tajikistan. Yet, in many ways, this is a new war that lacks the asymmetry of colonial operations and the locality of conflicts between bands of militias. This new social experience of war needs to be recorded and analyzed.
Combining the experiences of refugees from Ukraine, which was invaded by the Russian Federation, and of those who fled Russia itself, often generates criticism and rejection from those who subscribe to essentialist ideas about national homogeneity and collective responsibility. However, from the point of view of universal human rights, there can be no “right” and “wrong” experience of refugedom and forced emigration. Article 14 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from … acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
We take these points as the foundational premise as we formulate the focus of this project. The post-Soviet transition aimed at constituting a nationalizing state, and the war unleashed by the Russian regime to destroy Ukraine resulted from this process. In this sense, the refugees from the war are refugees from the destructive politics of this nationalizing course, whether they are fleeing the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine or leaving Russia itself, occupied by Putin’s regime and the nationalist part of the population.
Ab Imperio invites you to participate in the project Chronicles of War, Occupation, and Refugedom: An Archive of Post-Soviet Society’s Collapse. We ask you to email documents, photographs, and other media materials to <info@abimperio.net> or upload them to this website. Materials can also be sent by mail to: Ilya Gerasimov, 918 Keystone Ave, River Forest, IL 60305, USA. These materials will be made available to academic researchers and, with the author’s permission, may be published in Ab Imperio and other venues.
There are four different formats for submitting the archival materials:
1. You authorize the publication of documents under your name;
2. You authorize the publication of documents anonymously;
3. The documents cannot be published but are accessible to researchers in the archive under your name;
4. The documents cannot be published but are accessible to researchers in the archive anonymously.
Since the beginning of this war, “the return of history” has become a commonplace idea. This means that historians have a new job to do, which will require new historical sources! We also invite colleagues to collaborate with us in gathering, studying, and publishing these new archival materials.