Institute for International Relations Oral History Project?

The Institute for International Relations Oral History Project was established in early 1993 at the Institute for International Relations in Moscow, a research body chartered to document the preceding two years of Soviet collapse and renegotiation. The initiative emerged from a recognition among its founding director, Jadwiga Kowalski, and a small group of historians and archivists that the accounts of the August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords were fragmenting across official channels, personal papers, and the unreliable memory of officials who had already begun revising their own roles. The project's stated mandate was to preserve testimony from across nine USSS republics and the five departed republics while the principals were still alive and willing to speak, before institutional memory calcified or was destroyed.

Kowalski, a Polish-born historian who had spent the 1980s analyzing Soviet regional politics, secured initial funding through both Russian Sovereign Republic government channels and a small grant from a Berlin-based foundation with interests in Eastern European archival work. The project hired field researchers across Moscow, Nur-Sultan in Kazakhstan, Minsk in Belarus, and in the capitals of departing republics including Tallinn, Vilnius, and Tbilisi, tasking them with recording structured interviews with negotiators, Union officials, republican government ministers, and ordinary citizens who had lived through the transition. The interviews were conducted in Russian and regional languages, then translated and transcribed.

Between 1993 and 1996, the project recorded approximately 340 interviews, ranging from forty minutes to eight hours in length. The participants included figures who negotiated the Accords themselves, such as Boris Yeltsin's policy advisors and several Union-level ministers; officials from each of the nine remaining republics; and representatives from the departing states—most notably from the Baltic states, whose representatives described the experience of withdrawal and the border disputes that followed. The archive also contains interviews with journalists, factory workers, collective farm managers, teachers, and pensioners, capturing how the transformation was experienced across different regions and social positions. A significant subset of interviews focused on the Compromise of Sochi and the dual-track pricing system, recording the perspectives of economic planners who had advocated for and opposed the arrangement.

The project's methods were shaped by practical constraints and intellectual disputes that reflected broader disagreements within Soviet and post-Soviet scholarship. Interviews were conducted in formats ranging from highly structured question sequences to open-ended narrative collection, a variation that later researchers have noted makes comparative analysis uneven but preserves a richer texture of individual voice. Kowalski insisted on recording interviews in their original languages before translation, a decision that multiplied labour costs but ensured that later scholars could listen to tone, hesitation, and inflection in the original context. Funding limitations meant that field researchers were often themselves local academics and journalists with only brief training in interview methodology, leading to variable recording quality and depth.

The archive became accessible to scholars gradually. A portion was deposited in the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library by 1998, with catalogs published in 1999 and 2002. The Oral History Project: Voices from 1992 represents a curated subset of this material, drawn from the archive and repackaged with editorial contextualization for a broader audience. Access to the full archive has remained restricted in some cases where interviewees requested confidentiality, and clearance for certain interviews—particularly those involving security officials and negotiators from sensitive border regions—required formal requests and institutional vetting.

The project's collection has shaped subsequent scholarship on the August Emergency and the confederation's early years. Historians studying the Confederal Drift have drawn on interviews with republican leaders describing how autonomy was negotiated; scholars of the Union Rouble crisis cite interviews with central planners and finance ministers discussing the ideological and practical collisions that made dual-track pricing unsustainable. The archive has been less frequently consulted for the period after 1996, as subsequent crises—the economic collapse of 1998, the Tyumen Compact negotiations of 2014—generated their own documentation and recording projects. The original tapes and transcripts remain in institutional custody, though digital preservation initiatives begun in the 2010s have made the collection more accessible to researchers outside Moscow.

Formation and Scope

The decision to create an oral history project reflected uncertainty about how Soviet collapse would be recorded and by whom. The official archival record was incomplete; negotiators had worked across multiple sites with inconsistent documentation, and many records remained classified or in private hands. Government agencies produced their own histories, but these were institutional accounts focused on state positions rather than decision-making processes or the views of departing republics. Kowalski proposed that an independent oral history initiative could capture what official records would not: the contingency of events, the moments when negotiators considered alternatives, the reasoning of officials from republics that left the union, and the experience of those caught between competing claims.

The project's geographic scope reflected both the political reality of the remaining federation and the ambition to document departure itself. Core interviewing took place in the nine republics of the USSS—the Russian Sovereign Republic, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Sakha and Ukrainian republics—and in the five republics that departed: the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Researchers made particular efforts to reach officials from the Vienna Monitoring Office, the multilateral body created in 1992 to oversee compliance with the Accords, capturing their accounts of early disputes over implementation and the emerging fractures between republics over energy policy and fiscal authority.

The archive is organized by date of interview, by republic, and by occupation or role, though the indexing has been inconsistent and digitization is still incomplete. Researchers seeking material on specific events or personalities have historically needed to work through the Archives directly or consult published summaries of interview contents, a friction that has limited the collection's use by scholars outside the former Soviet space.