Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen - 2025 Cluster Recipient
KGB and Indigenous People of Soviet Crimea: The Thesaurus of Repression (1944–1964)
Project Lead: Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen
Professor
Faculty of Arts
Department Modern Langauges & Cultural Studies
Using AI tools to explore how the Soviet secret services, particularly the KGB, employed repressive ideological language to control and suppress the Crimean Tatars, Karaites, and Krymchaks - now recognized as the indgenous peoples of Ukraine.
Project Description:
Our project, AI Tools for the KGB Archives, explores how the Soviet secret services, particularly the KGB, employed repressive ideological language to control and suppress Crimean Tatars, Karaites, and Krymchaks—now recognized as indigenous peoples of Ukraine. This project seeks to understand how the KGB used language as a tool of ideological framing to undermine these cultural and religious minorities. Nowhere else did such ideological language receive so much elaboration as in the cabinets and files of the Soviet secret services.
Focusing on 353 KGB case reports (113,197 digital images) submitted between 1964 and 1991 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, we will examine how the struggles of these peoples to maintain their political and cultural identities were profiled. Through the application of OCR to Cyrillic texts and AI tools, we will identify, translate, and decode patterns and codes used by the KGB. The project will create a searchable database of these patterns, and once complete, we will analyze synchronic and diachronic relationships in the data to answer the key research question: how did the KGB's language contribute to systemic repression?
Focusing on 353 KGB case reports (113,197 digital images) submitted between 1964 and 1991 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, we will examine how the struggles of these peoples to maintain their political and cultural identities were profiled. Through the application of OCR to Cyrillic texts and AI tools, we will identify, translate, and decode patterns and codes used by the KGB. The project will create a searchable database of these patterns, and once complete, we will analyze synchronic and diachronic relationships in the data to answer the key research question: how did the KGB's language contribute to systemic repression?
天涯社区 Team Members:
- Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (PI)
- Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell
- Dr. Alla Nedashkivska
- Dr. Frank Sysyn
External Team Members:
- Dr. Andriy Kohut
- Dr. Olexii Ignatenko