Mikhail Nakonechnyi, a postdoctoral researcher, responsible for historical dimension of the GULAGEchoes project, has started his first archival fieldwork in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow). The archive contains tens of thousands of case files, which could be relevant to the purposes of the project. Concurrently working with materials of the GULAG, the Ministry of Justice and camp Procuracy, he intends to glean unpublished documents, generated by the Stalinist law enforcement agencies. These unique sources allow to get a multi-institutional perspective on the questions of ethnicity and ethnic relations in the Soviet system of judicial incarceration between 1930 and 1953.
Gulag Echoes in the “multicultural prison”: historical and geographical influences on the identity and politics of ethnic minority prisoners in the communist successor states of Russia and Europe