Digital access to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission: archives of war

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic and then the war in Ukraine have disrupted access to archives, intensifying scholars’ concerns about a return to Cold War conditions for research. These concerns are especially pronounced for study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, a field where specialists have often struggled to locate and assimilate information even before recent crises. This article examines digital options for accessing the records of the Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK), established by Stalin's government on November 2, 1942, to gather evidence of Axis war crimes. Through an analysis of the digital projects launched over the past two decades, this article demonstrates that enhanced online access to Soviet documentation of Nazi atrocities has gone hand in hand with the radicalization of Putin's regime. The politicized rhetoric that frequently accompanies these undertakings has obscured the value of the digital resources themselves. Scholars of the Shoah should approach the ChGK's records as products of mass mobilization rather than uniform pronouncements from a “totalitarian” state. Equipped with this knowledge, together with the scale and comparative reach of digital methods, researchers can deepen understanding of the Holocaust against the backdrop of a new generation of war crimes in the former USSR.