Humanitarian Aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian War: Historical and Cultural Visions and Modern Survival Strategies
- Documentation is ongoing
- Chernihiv WAR Center
- ChernihivCrimeaDnipropetrovskDonetskKharkivKhersonKyivOdesaSumyZaporizhiaZhytomyr
- 14.05.2022 - 31.03.2024
- Partnerships, cooperation: Department of Culture and Tourism of Chernihiv City Council, Documenting Ukraine, Center for Applied Anthropology, Northern Cultural Capital, Ukraina Moderna, Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine
- Svitlana Makhovska, co-founder of Chernihiv WAR Center, co-organizer, research manager, and project implementer
- [email protected]
The project aim is to record and preserve oral history evidence of the events of the Russo-Ukrainian war (peculiarities of the everyday military life, survival strategies under occupation, siege, and during active hostilities, life in evacuation, volunteer movement, military folklore, and the experience of Ukrainian scholars and soldiers).
For two years, the researchers explored 25 settlements in the Chernihiv Oblast (Chernihiv and Ripky Districts) and 3 neighborhoods in Chernihiv. During the second stage of the project, the archive was expanded with audio recordings of oral history testimonies from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Kyiv, Donetsk, Odesa, Kherson, Sumy, and Kharkiv oblasts, as well as interviews with refugees from Zhytomyr, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in Germany. In two years, we managed to record the testimonies of 218 respondents, record 212 hours of digital information, and accumulate 1560 photographs, 3 handwritten diaries, and 1 video diary of the occupation period in the project archive.