“We ended up with thousands and thousands of papers, beyond our wildest dreams of what we could have accessed.” Dr Filip Slaveski It is the last famine in European history. The ensuing food shortages are thought to have killed at least a million people across western Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, although there are estimates the death toll could be as high as three million. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a terrible drought compounded severe wartime agricultural problems which continued to plague the sector. “In a sense, we’ve become a repository.”Īs the recipients of a 2021 Discovery Projects grant from the Australian Research Council, Slaveski and his team of researchers are hoping to produce the first comprehensive English language history of the Soviet famine. “It’s a strange situation where Western researchers might now have the only copies of things that are so important,” Slaveski says. Until the conflict ceases, the archivists will not be able to safely assess the extent of the destruction. Power outages, burst pipes and damp basements could all cause untold harm – not just to the fragile hardcopies, but also to digital material preserved on hard drives and servers. Archives rely on fans, temperature control and ventilation to assist with preservation, and budget constraints meant this was already challenging before the war. “I know particularly they’ve been bombing intelligence agencies and the intelligence archives.” “By virtue of where these things are located, they’re in danger,” Slaveski says. While there is little evidence the archives are being targeted specifically, many such sites are located in government buildings, which are vulnerable to military attacks. The threat to the information safeguarded in the Ukrainian archives is twofold. “And that’s especially dangerous because so much of the information that’s held there is still under lock and key in Russia.” Dr Filip Slaveski. “There’s been a real fear among many people in the field that these archival sites could be destroyed,” Slaveski says. A historian from The Australian National University (ANU) is helping to prevent thousands of Soviet-era Ukrainian documents from becoming casualties of the Russian invasion.ĭr Filip Slaveski from the ANU Research School of Social Sciences has acquired digitised copies of accounts and resources relating to the Soviet famine of 1946-1947, a tragic period of history about which very little is known.Īs the war continues, the danger that the original versions of these papers could be damaged or destroyed remains ever-present.
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