Ab Imperio is an international scholarly journal and research project dedicated to the study of complex societies, mainly focusing on the territories of the former USSR, but by no means limited to them. Over a quarter of a century, the journal has published about 1,500 scholars from almost 40 countries—half of them representing post-Soviet countries, with an equal share of Russian and Ukrainian authors. More than 100 scientific libraries from Vladivostok to Lviv receive hard copies of the journal. One outcome of Ab Imperio’s activities as a collective research project has been the development of a postnational, non-Russocentric history course dealing with the region that might be more neutrally defined as Northern Eurasia (see also the Russian edition).

On December 11, 2013, the editors of Ab Imperio publicly expressed their support for Euromaidan, and in early March 2014 they condemned the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In its 3/2014 issue, Ab Imperio was the first to publish a comprehensive thematic forum dedicated to the Euromaidan and the war in Donbas. The journal systematically discusses decolonization, underscoring the fallacy of reducing this problem to an endorsement of one nationalism at the expense of stigmatization of another. By deconstructing all types of groupness, Ab Imperio consistently prioritizes the value of individual rights, including the right to life and personal and collective self-determination.

A full description of this project is available here. In short, the editors of Ab Imperio seek to fill a glaring void – the lack of systematic documentation of personal experiences related to the mass exodus of Ukrainian and Russian citizens since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The emigration from the former Russian Empire after 1917 produced several projects, such as The Archive of the Russian Revolution, which collected the firsthand experience of refugees as witnesses of their old society’s catastrophe. Similar work is needed today, since the scale of the exodus from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus is comparable to the postrevolutionary exodus of the early twentieth century.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 violently put an end to three decades of post-Soviet society. Millions of people from Ukraine and hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their countries because of the war, and they are the main target audience of our project. Practically inseparable from them are refugees from Belarus after the suppression of the 2020 Revolution, whom we also ask to share their testimonies. The plight of the residents of Karabakh is catastrophic. Ultimately, anyone from post-Soviet countries who perceives themselves as a refugee from a country in which it was unsafe to remain is invited to participate in the project. 

The submitted materials will serve as an invaluable historical source for researchers.

There are four different formats for submitting materials for this archive: 

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.

Back in the 1920s it was easier to answer this question. The emigration archives contain newspaper clippings, letters, diaries, photographs, transcripts of speeches and lectures, ID cards and other official documents. A hundred years later, the variety of media formats is much greater. In addition to the old formats, there are screenshots of chats and videos, text and voice messages. Please contact us at info@abimperio.net to discuss the available options. 

Of course, you can. If you have changed your mind, we will remove your material from the database; no one will be able to see it.

If so, please contact us at info@abimperio.net.