Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challenges in the Digital Age

Abstract

The chapter discusses the production of digital archives in Russia as part of a complex political economy of historical knowledge. Several high-profile digital archives have been produced within the framework of grant funding provided by international agencies and commercial content providers and have reflected the priorities of the funding organizations by focusing on state violence in Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), international Communist movement, as well as other politicized or easily monetized content. At the same time, national and regional archives in Russia also engaged in the digitization of their collections by soliciting federal and local funding. These latter projects emphasized complexity and objectivity as the two key categories of the digitization of archives while pursuing an underlying political agenda to restore epistemic sovereignty over Russian history.