The History of a Moscow Apartment House as Told by its Residents. A Microhistorical Anthropology of Migration and Memory
Dmitriy Oparin (Fellow, Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, MWNO Helsinki)
The project is a microhistorical and anthropological study focusing on the history of an apartment building in Moscow, built in 1904 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. This house is primarily known as the first Moscow address of writer Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) and one of the key settings of his novel The Master and Margarita. While the story of Bulgakov and his characters in the house is a secondary narrative in this study, it focuses on the destinies of numerous families who lived at this address across the 20th century. Through the prism of the historical and contemporary daily life of one house, the project analyzes broader issues and themes, such as the intense migration to Moscow, the histories of various ethnic communities in the city, the anthropology of communal living systems, and family memory in the late Soviet period and contemporary Russia. In this way, the project uses the lens of everyday life and family history dramas to shed new light on the long twentieth century. The research is based on a range of sources, including pre-revolutionary and Soviet archival documents, media archives, and artefacts from a wide range of personal or family collections, alongside interviews conducted as part of anthropological fieldwork, which is based on long-term relationships with several dozen families who lived in the building in decades past, as well as some still today. In these ways, the project is situated at the crossroads of microhistory, memory studies, urban ethnic studies, the history and anthropology of migration, and critical heritage studies.
History of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (1922–1936)
David Jishkariani (MWNO Tbilisi) – PhD project
The Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Republic (TSFSR) emerged as a new federative entity within the newly formed Soviet Union. Following brief periods of independence, the three Caucasian republics – Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia – were integrated into this federation under Moscow’s direction. This research project focuses on the Federation and its institutions at the federative level. The study aims to address four main questions: 1) How were center-periphery relations formed between Moscow and Tbilisi?, 2) How were Korenizatsia (indigenization) and cultural policies in the South Caucasus implemented, and how were they managed within the federative structures?, 3) How were borders established within the federation, both internally among the member republics and externally with neighboring countries, Iran, and Turkey?, 4) How did the political elite evolve in the Caucasus over the 14-year period, transitioning from the revolutionary order to a national elite? Answering these questions will facilitate a reconstruction of the functioning of the federation’sinstitutions in their transregional and international contexts. To achieve this, documents from the archives of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Poland, Germany, Great Britain, and the USA will be consulted.
Nature’s Infections. Disease, Environment and Soviet Medicine in the Pacific Borderlands, 1930-1970
Anna Mazanik (MWNO Helsinki)
The project offers a history of the Soviet experience with two endemic diseases of the Pacific region: tick-borne encephalitis and Japanese encephalitis. Combining the approaches of the history of science, history of public health and environmental history, it investigates the Soviet trans-border efforts to understand and control encephalitis in Primorie, Manchuria and on the Korean peninsula in the context of the colonization of the Far East as well as the Second World War and the Cold War. Through the lens of these two dangerous diseases, my project provides a new perspective on the social, political and environmental transformation of the Pacific borderlands in the middle of the twentieth century and highlights this region as an important space of Stalinist science and Soviet health internationalism.
The Work Diary of Heinrich Himmler, 1937–1938
Matthias Uhl (MWNO Helsinki) with Dieter Pohl (Universität Klagenfurt) und Thomas Pruschwitz (Potsdam)
MWNO – editorial project
The project consists in assembling an academic edition of Heinrich Himmler’s work diary for the years 1937 and 1938. The diary – which is archived in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) and CAMO – has been digitized. Currently, electronic indexing of all individuals meeting with Himmler in the years in question is under way. Detailed commentary on all entries to the work diary is compiled with the help of Dieter Pohl (Klagenfurt) and Thomas Pruschwitz (Potsdam) along with introductory articles to the edition.
Soviet Prisoners of War – An international research and documentation project
Esther Meier (MWNO Bonn) and Team
During the Second World War about 5,7 million members of the Soviet military – men and women – ended up in German captivity. More than three million died because of the inhuman conditions or were murdered. With funding by the federal government, the project traces the individual lives of POWs from across the Soviet Union and to make the relevant documents and data from German, post-Soviet and other archives available in a database hosted by the Memorial Archives of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp.
Project work took place in Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, Serbia, France and Switzerland.
German Generals and Officers in NKGB/MGB Captivity
Matthias Uhl (MWNO Helsinki) with Henrik Eberle
MWNO – editorial project
The edition covers the interrogation protocols and testimonies of German military personnel and diplomats in NKGB/MGB captivity – accompanied by extensive academic commentary. They are informative of the military and diplomatic relations of the Third Reich with Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The documents not only provide an overview of German preparations and conduct of war, but indicate also the methods, interests, priorities and strategic considerations of Soviet secret services.
The KGB and Chushchev (1954-1964)
Matthias Uhl (MWNO Helsinki) with Valdimir Chaustov
MWNO editorial project
The documents in this edition relate the ways in which the soviet secret service KGB informed Nikita S. Chrushchev about important political, economic and military events. The question is how this did differ from KGB reports to his predecessor Iosif V. Stalin and how this information influenced Chushchev’s decision making.
Eurasia (de)territorial. Forced Migration, Ethnic Policies and Settler Colonialism in the Soviet Union.
Moritz Florin (MWNO Tbilisi)
The project investigates the connections between settler colonialism, forced migration and territoriality. It focuses on the one hand, on the effects of (re)settlement on the self-understanding of the settler communities concerned. On the other hand, it is about the consequences for indigenous communities and their ways of life due to their contact with (forced) settlers and their economic practices (i.e. regarding agriculture, eating habits, religion) as well as their local and ethno-national self-understandings. The project will explore the overlap between settlement and resettlement, migration and colonization, indigenous and alien. This puts the project at the intersection of migration, environmental and agricultural history of the Soviet Union.
One key interest is in the transhumanity and survival of (semi)nomadic ways of life in Tusheti and Kazakhstan as well as the consequences of Russian-Soviet rule on the seasonal migration of cattle and pastoralists. Another is the contact zones between settlers/newcomers and locals.
Another part of the project looks at the ego documents of former (forced) settlers that are going to be digitized. With the help of these documents, the connections between (forced) migration between the North and South Caucasus, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Russian Federation (Siberia) more visible.
Soviet citizens in utero. A History of the Unborn Child in the Soviet Union
Birte Kohtz (MWNO Helsinki)
Prenatal life saw an epistemic change following medical science’s and biology’s findings on life in utero in the 19th and 20th century. This resulted in an increasing separation between mother and unborn and the ensuing construction of an embryonic/foetal subject which, however, remained dependent on the mother and was her responsibility (Duden, Löwy, Arni). Following this line of argument, this project surmises that the Unborn and the Prenatal are historical phenomena and can, thus, be analyzed as such. The analysis of conceptualizations of unborn life and its treatment goes beyond a history of the science and knowledge, as they also shed light onto Soviet utopia and fears, notions of order and values as well as Soviet biopolitics. The project explores the Unborn as an object of science and knowledge in the context of scientific and medical-technical developments in the Soviet Union. It also ask about the role of lay persons in developing concepts of the development of the Unborn and their imaginations. Further fields of inquiry are the biopolitical strategies in the late Soviet Union and how the Prenatal and the Unborn figured in gender relations, views on disability, environmental problems, inner-Soviet power relations and networks without.
Between Disintegration and Rebuilding. An Oral History of post-Soviet Transformation
Kirill Levinson (MWNO Vilnius)
The project explores the country, milieu and gender specific experiences of with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet reconstruction. A particular focus will be put on the effects of new ideological and political-geographical orientation on the working everyday and leisure time along with new identities and visions of the future.
As a pilot study, it will focus on the fate of academics, more specifically historians, in the 30 years of post-Soviet change. How did their role change in the different post-Soviet societies? How did lines of inquiry, international plarforms and patterns of cooperation evolve? The project will be based on autobiographical interviews conducted by locals in five different post-Soviet states in the respective national languages (unless an interviewee chooses another language). Later, the set of interviewees is to be broadened to natural scientists, businessmen, employees of state-owned enterprises and members of the bureaucracy of different ages.
Digital History in the South Caucasus and Central Asia
Moritz Florin (MWNO Tbilisi) with Felix Ackermann (Fernuniverstität Hagen) and Dina Gagarina (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
There are numerous digital history projects in the South Caucasus and Central Asia that provide access to digitized archival sources and research data, inform about archival hodlings and repositories and provide researchers with an opportunity to secure and share their data and digitized sources. To connect these different projects is part of the MWNO’s mission.
Another goal is to analyze the digital history landscapes in these regions, take note of the eminent foci of these projects and the means they employ. To what degree are such projects dependent on certain states and technologies and what consequences does that have? How are questions of sustainability dealt with? The project also wants to support the regional development of digital history through summer schools and training courses on digital history in Armenia and Georgia with local partners.

