Conferences, Talks, and Special Events

Throughout the years, the Jacques Rossi Memorial Fund for Gulag Research has sponsored and supported numerous conferences, seminars, and special events.

In Prague, from June 19 to 21, 2024, the Fund—together with the Czechoslovaks in the Gulag Project and Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes—co-sponsored the international conference “Researching the NKVD/KGB and the Opening of Soviet Secret Police Archives in Ukraine, 2014-2024.” The conference showcased and evaluated a decade of international scholarly research conducted in the former Soviet state security archives in Ukraine. It also examined the dilemmas and opportunities currently confronting the international scholarly community and wartime conditions. Scholarly papers offered new insights into the history of the Soviet secret police and revealed new findings on repression, violence, and forced labor. A number of papers explored perpetrator studies and the conceptualization of enemies; the history of information, surveillance, and informing; the institutional history of the secret police; methodologies of secret policing and the history of technology; and the secret police’s broader impact on and interactions with politics, culture, and society. Roundtable discussions further addressed the impact of new work on the secret police from the former KGB archives in Ukraine, and interrogated the state of the field. Participants also considered the questions and challenges of scholarly cooperation in the digital age and during wartime, with examples of projects launched and a consideration of public history.

In April 2020, the Rossi Fund hosted a virtual conference and webinar series titled “The Political Police and the Soviet System: Insights from Newly Opened KGB Archives in the Former Soviet States.” This series of webinars presented cutting-edge historical scholarship on newly opened secret police archives, illuminating a major piece of twentieth-century history and its legacies. The webinars sought to bring together international scholars at all career stages, including from North America, Europe, and Eurasia, to discuss the significance of research on the Soviet secret police, the penal system, forced labor, and intelligence history. These archives, including the SBU (former KGB) archive in Kyiv and repositories in the Baltics, Georgia, Moldova, and other former Soviet republics, represent some of the most important archival material on modern intelligence history opened to researchers in recent years. As new sources become accessible, new problems of analysis emerge. The goal of the webinar series was to examine these challenges and to consider how the incorporation of these new materials has changed our understanding of the Soviet system. Sponsorship for the series was provided by the Jacques Rossi Memorial Fund for Gulag Research, with additional support from the Georgetown Office for Global Engagement, the Russian History Seminar of Washington, DC, the International Centre for the History and Sociology of WWII at the Higher School of Economics, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, with assistance from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The Webinar Series and conference papers can be viewed here.

Other Recent Events

In recent years, the Rossi Fund has sponsored guest papers on a variety of topics related to the Gulag in conjuncture with the Russian History Seminar of Washington, DC. This forum has afforded authors an opportunity to present their latest research to scholars and doctoral students from the Washington region, usually in the form of pre-circulated draft papers. Recent presenters have included:

• Steve Barnes (George Mason University: “Gulag Wives: Women, Family, and Survival in Stalin’s Terror” [2017]), prizewinning historian of the Gulag.
• Daniel Beer (University of London, Royal Holloway: The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars), winner of the Cundill History Prize.
• Diana Dumitru (Ion Creangă Pedagogical State University: “From Holocaust to GULAG: The Stalinist Penal System and Soviet Jews after WWII” [2019]).
• Stuart Finkel (University of Florida: “‘I Reserve the Right to Criticize My Friends’: Roger Baldwin, the International Committee for Political Prisoners, and Letters from Russian Prisons (1925)” [2018]).
• Oksana Kornilova (Katyn Memorial Museum in Smolensk, Russia: “The Gulag from Moscow to Minsk: The Construction of the First Soviet Highway in the 1930s” [2015]) who also spoke about her research and memorialization of the Soviet massacres of Polish officers in 1940 at Katyn.

Additionally, the fund sponsors Georgetown screenings of films with a Gulag theme including documentaries as well as Soviet and post-Soviet cinematic efforts like the Aleksandr Proshkin film The Cold Summer of 1953.

The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations

The Rossi Fund was launched in April 2013 with a major international conference at Georgetown. “The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations” brought together leading scholars of the Gulag from the United States, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Russian Federation, France, Germany and Canada to discuss the state of Gulag research and new directions for the field. Three days of spirited inquiry helped yield a special issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16 no.3 (Summer 2015) and the significant collected volume The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison in 2016.