Archivarische Erschließung der Bestände Lew Kopelews und vier weiterer Dissidenten der älteren Generation sowjetischer, linksreformistisch orientierter Bürgerrechtlerinnen zur Zeit des Kalten Krieges

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Schattenberg
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 217360049

The extensive estate. of the prominent Soviet civil rights activist, dissident and emigrant Lev Kopelev (approx. 530 archive boxes) constitutes, tagether with the estates of Natal'ja Gorbanevskaja, Kronid Ljubarskij, Sarra Babenyseva und lgor' Golomstok (totalling approx. 715 archive boxes), a unique international collection of material of the older generation of male and female Soviet leftist reform civil rights activists. They all share in common the effect of Stalinism, which had a fundamental impact on their thought and action in the Moscow dissident milieu of the 1960s and 1970s and ultimately in exile in the West. These estates are additionally linked by the extensive correspondences they exhibit between the individual bequeathers of the different estates. lncluded are numerous Ietter exchanges with Soviet and international actors in multiple languages, which offers further insight into cross-border communities of discourse, intellectual networks and cultures of dissent in the context of the 'divided' worlds of the Cold War.lt is necessary to make these collections accessible in parallel, and to do so expeditiously, for it is now possible to request clarifications from the still living relatives of the authors of the collections. Moreover, reappraising the post-Stalinist era has now taken centre stage in international East European research. Against this backdrop, the project aims at making the Research Centre's substantially more extensive complete collection of archives of dissident authors into a central research portal. For this purpose, the project contributes in a special way: By making the extensive correspondences of the five authors of the collections accessible, it will enable research into further networks among the dissidents both in the Soviet Union and in exile. This project also serves as a model for further archive projects, both at the Research Centre as weil as at its partner archives in East (Central) Europe. lt succeeds in creating a systematic index, which-in light of the conditions of censorship under which most of the correspondences arose-is urgently needed. Plus, it accomplishes important preparatory work for the future creation, in cooperation with the ISRA partners, of a comprehensive thesaurus.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)