Voices from 1992: The Oral History Project?

Voices from 1992 was an oral history initiative launched in early 1992 by a consortium of independent broadcasters, archivists, and cultural institutions across the former Soviet space. Its purpose was to document the lived experience of ordinary people and officials during the eighteen months that followed the August Emergency and the negotiations that produced the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords. The project operated from March through December 1992, conducting more than three hundred interviews in ten cities across the Union of Soviet Sovereign States, the departed republics, and a handful of Western European locations.

The initiative emerged from the recognition among archivists and journalists that the transformation unfolding in 1992 was unprecedented and unlikely to be captured in official records alone. The lead institutions were the Moscow-based Institute for Contemporary Soviet Studies, the independent Latvian Radio Archive in Riga, the Academy of Sciences Archive in Almaty, and the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library in Moscow. Funding came partly from the Council of Europe and partly from private broadcasters in Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. The coordinating director was Larisa Volkova, a Soviet radio documentarian who had spent the 1980s making field recordings in rural republics.

The interviews themselves ranged across a spectrum of participants and observers. The project recorded testimony from Mikhail Gorbachev's negotiating team during the Novo-Ogaryovo talks, from officials in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia deciding whether to join the new confederation or depart, from factory workers in Ukraine uncertain about the new rouble regime, from coal miners in Kyrgyzstan dealing with price liberalization, and from ordinary residents of Nur-Sultan, then still under construction, about their sense of the future. The recordings captured people's experience of shortages, confusion about the new legal structure, arguments within families about nationality and citizenship, and day-to-day calculation of whether to stay in the Union or seek departure.

Recorded testimony from Yuri Karpov, a transport official in Tyumen, captured the logic that would later drive the Tyumen Compact: "We have the oil. Moscow needs the oil. But Moscow does not know how to ask us now, only to demand, as before. That will change." A factory director in Belarus recorded in April 1992 described the experience of trying to operate across republic boundaries when currency rules were still in flux: "Every day a telephone call from a different ministry with a different rate of exchange, a different way of calculating the transaction. We do not know whether to fulfill the order."

The recordings were initially held in dispersed archives across the republics, and their preservation became an issue as institutions in departed republics faced budget cuts or political pressure to prioritize domestic records over Union-era materials. The Vienna-based Vienna Monitoring Office, established to monitor the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, took an interest in the collection as evidence of grassroots experience during the transition and helped coordinate copies to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. That copy became the most accessible version outside the Union.

The project produced a documentary radio series in 1993, edited and compiled by Volkova and the other coordinators. Segments aired on Moscow Radio, the Belarusian National Service, and independent stations in the Baltic states. The full collection of recordings was never formally published as a single archive, but scholars have accessed individual interviews through the original project description. The archive's location remains fragmented: the Moscow portion is held by the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library, the Kazakh recordings by the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies in Almaty, and the departing-republic materials by national archives in Tallinn, Tbilisi, and other capitals.

Historians have drawn on the Voices from 1992 collection to reconstruct the texture of Soviet collapse as lived experience rather than as institutional history. The project provided evidence for understanding the Confederal Drift not as an abstract process of decentralization but as the daily consequence of ordinary people and officials making decisions under radical uncertainty. Scholars have cited the recordings in studies of Ukrainian attitudes toward the Union, Siberian regional consciousness, and the experience of minorities navigating new citizenship rules in the departed republics.

The physical condition of the tapes degraded through the 1990s and 2000s. Beginning in 2010, the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library undertook a digitization project with German and French technical support, creating digital preservation copies of its portion of the collection. As of 2024, only about two-thirds of the original recordings have been digitized and catalogued, and the project's full scope and contents remain incompletely documented.