Kseniia Kuzina and Roman Podkur

Kseniiya Kuzina: My stay at INED began September 5 and continues until November 30. I’m here thanks to the PAUSE program for scientists in danger—precisely my case due to the current Russian-Ukrainian war. This is first time I’ve been to France, and it’s the start of my cooperation with INED, where I’m pursuing research begun in Ukraine. I hope that the exchanges I’m having with French colleagues will enable me to continue with my research as well as possible. 

Roman Podkur: I began collaborating with INED in 2011, the year I met INED researcher Alain Blum at a conference. Together we had the idea of studying the socialization process of people deported under Stalin from western Ukraine and Lithuania to distant Soviet regions and who then returning to their homeland after 1953. We’re interested in their paths their lives took after returning, up until the 1980s and actions by communist leaders in Lithuania and Soviet Ukraine targeting these groups in particular: they tried to change their world view and make them “true” Soviet citizens. 
I’ll be continuing my research at INED until this project is complete, at which point we will be publishing a collection of annotated documents and a series of scientific articles. 

Kseniiya Kuzina: I’m continuing my research on women in the Soviet political police in the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on a range of women: those who participated in acts of political repression and executions; women who worked as secret agents and spies; and women who worked in the administration. I began work on this subject just before the war. In Fall 2021, I managed to collect the documents I needed in Ukraine’s security service archives (the KGB before the end of the USSR, now called the SBU); these are the documents I’m currently studying. On November 21, I gave a talk entitled “Women in the service of the Cheka-GPU in the 1920s” at a seminar jointly organized by INED and CERCEC [Center for Russian, Caucasian, and Central European Studies].  

Roman Podkur: My research is on the history of the communist secret police in the USSR; state terror in the Soviet era; violence against the civilian population during World War II. I study the characteristics and consequences of state terror in Soviet Ukraine and the USSR as a whole. Historians have already studied various forms of state terror: mass arrests, executions, imprisonment in concentration camps, and deportations. But researchers have not yet fully investigated or analyzed the impact of Soviet Union Communist Party bureaucracy on individuals. That’s the question I focus on. 

Kseniiya Kuzina: The Russian-Ukrainian war created threats and challenges for science in Ukraine. Like all Ukrainians, scientists now have to survive physically and do all they can to protect their families. The death and destruction caused by the incessant Russian bombing has forced us to change our daily lives. In such circumstances it can be difficult to concentrate on scientific work. What’s more, the scope of some scientific programs has been reduced due to the interruption of state funding. But even in these circumstances, Ukraine’s scientists are reluctant to abandon their work and are searching for opportunities to pursue it. So they are continuing to write and produce scientific articles and monographic studies.   

Roman Podkur: Scientific research in Ukraine is concentrated in the institutions of the country’s Academy of Sciences. But due to extreme bureaucratization, funding is not always used efficiently. And there is not enough funding. This is the main reason young researchers are going to European research centers to conduct their studies, and it is why they may even leave science. The problem of underfunding has been sharply exacerbated by the Russian-Ukrainian war. What’s more, the bureaucratic system itself raises obstacles, hardly facilitating large-scale research. In this context, doing research jointly with European institutions has become a means for Ukrainian scientists to escape this difficult situation.  We are trying to benefit as much as possible from these opportunities, and to develop our positive experience in European scientific institutions in our own scientific institutions.