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In the first stage of this collaboration in March 2025, CIUS was awarded a Partnership Development Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and a Research Cluster Grant from the U of A’s Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS). Over the next three years, these awards will enable CIUS and the Security Services of Ukraine Sectoral State Archive—together with seven other academic organizations in four countries—to develop and launch a suite of AI-based interpretive tools and research protocols aimed at tracking, analyzing, and exposing repressive language in KGB files that was used to erase Crimean Tatars as an Indigenous people of Crimea from historical maps and the social memory of Soviet society, both within and outside of Ukraine (1944–91).

This collaboration builds on the previous successful partnership between the HDA-SBU and the U of A’s Faculty of Arts that focused on the study of KGB censorship of personal correspondence and resulted in the development of the online exhibit “Trapped in Archives of Repression: Personal Letters in ex-KGB Archives” (2021–24). A related pilot study is on the way at CIUS examining the applicability of selected AI tools to the analysis of ideological discourse and language structures employed in the select set of KGB reporting documents in the last two decades of Soviet rule in Ukraine (1970–91).