#Data

The research project "Sound Archives: European Memories of the Gulag" was led by the Center for Russian, Caucasian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC, UMR 8083 - EHESS/CNRS) and was coordinated by Alain Blum (CERCEC-EHESS and INED), Marta Craveri (CERCEC-EHESS), and Valérie Nivelon (RFI – Radio France Internationale). The project received support from the French National Research Agency (ANR-07-CORP-004). Fieldwork was conducted primarily from 2008 to 2012 and continued until 2021.
Audio interviews form the core of this research. A total of 208 people testified about their own or their parents' deportation to the camps, prisons, and special settlement villages of the Soviet Gulag. These testimonies not only cover their experiences with deportation but also their entire life trajectories. They describe life before deportation, liberation, and return; departure to other destinations; and the continuation of their lives in exile.
The interviewees were displaced or deported before, during, and after World War II and during the Stalinist period (1939–1953) from Central and Eastern European territories to places of deportation in the USSR. These places—forced labor camps, prisons, and special settlement villages—formed a system commonly known as the “Gulag,” a Russian acronym for “Principal Camp Administration.” These camps and villages were located in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Far North.
The project focused on individuals sent not only to the camps but also to special settlement villages, as well as individuals and families who were deported from territories annexed by the USSR after the German-Soviet pact of August 1939 (eastern Poland, which became western Ukraine and western Belarus, as well as parts of Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), but also from territories that entered the Soviet sphere after the war, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany.

The interview corpus

This research project resulted in the collection of 214 audio interviews, 72 of which were filmed. The interviews lasted between one and five hours.
Most of the interviews were conducted during field surveys in 16 countries—Russia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Kazakhstan, Slovakia, and Bulgaria—between 2008 and 2012, as part of the initial research project funded by the ANR. Twenty-six additional interviews were collected by the research team from 2013 to 2021, primarily from witnesses in Russia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
Due to the interviewees' diverse countries of origin and exile, these testimonies were collected in 14 languages (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, English, French, and German) by a team of 15 researchers fluent in at least one of these languages. More than half of the interviews (117) were conducted in Russian. In collaboration with professional interpreters and RFI, a third of the interviews were translated into English or French, and audio versions (and video, if available) with simultaneous translation were produced (interpretation only or dubbing of the original).
Information on the interviews and interviewees, including biographies and deportation and return trajectories, as well as more than 2,500 photographs and digital copies of documents collected during field surveys, have been documented in a freely accessible online database.
This collection of interviews is a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers studying forced displacement, exile, and deportation "from the ground up." The database can also be a valuable tool for language teaching and learning.

Data availability in the “Recherche Data Gouv” repository

Most of the interviews are available in the MEDG — European Memoirs of the Gulag collection in the “Recherche Data Gouv” repository (CNRS Research Data). The INED publishing department, the Humathèque Condorcet library, and the CNRS Research Data repository created this collection through cooperation as part of a project supported by the FNSO (AAP-FNSO-0002-17, 2022-2024). All data will be deposited by the end of 2025.

Conditions of access

Access to and reuse of the datasets is limited to research, scientific production, and teaching purposes. These conditions are specified for each file available in the repository.
Researchers, teachers, and students can submit requests to access one or more files or the entire interview corpus via the research data repository portal.