�³����� was first planning his PhD, it was a given, considering his focus on the Okhrana secret police force during the First World War, that he would travel to Russia over the course of his studies.

“I expected that working in Russian archives would be a central part of my PhD,” he told 51�Թ�. “I’d started contacting the main state archive in Moscow, and I was preparing my visa application.”

Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the devastating years of war that followed. In the wake of February 2022, academics who study Russia from outside the country have seen their work upended. “For most Western scholars, there is almost no access to archival documents or library materials in the Russian Federation,” said Aaron Retish, professor of Russian history at Wayne State University.��

“Sanctions and visa restrictions keep scholars from researching in Russia,” Retish said. “And even if Westerners were able to research in Russia, most scholars do not want to work with or support state institutions that support Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

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In the end, for Bryson, who graduated from the University of Exeter in 2024 and has since held part-time lecturer roles, the restrictions meant he could not visit Russia at all.

Before 2022, “Russia had generally been pretty good with their archives,” said Jeff Sahadeo, professor of Russian and Eurasian history, contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus at Carleton University. In the late 20th century there was an “archive revolution” of sorts: “I started my PhD in 1994, and that was kind of the golden age of access. There was this real excitement to share information.”

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Still, archives were “worried about giving access to sensitive things”, Sahadeo noted. “Two colleagues of mine were kicked out of Russia before Covid – these were ethnographers, looking at migration topics. This limiting of access has happened progressively, really since 2014.”

Catriona Kelly, honorary professor of Russian and Soviet culture at the University of Cambridge, said that “despite steps backward, [such as] greater restrictions on certain materials, [archive] access went on improving after 2000, [with] better conditions, greater transparency about holdings and longer opening hours”.

“The ‘archive revolution' was important, not just because there was far more information available about how the Russian Empire and the USSR operated as political systems, but because it was possible to research social and cultural history much more thoroughly.”

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Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

However, the Covid pandemic “dealt a significant blow to archive access,” Kelly said, “both because the Russian borders were closed for significant periods of time and also because you could only visit reading rooms, when they were open at all, in prebooked slots”.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, “the first main issue was that Western researchers just did not feel like they wanted to go,” said Sahadeo. “Because of the personal danger to them, and philosophical opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.”

For some scholars, the choice was made for them: “Some have been explicitly banned from entering Russia, in a sort of tit-for-tat retaliation for Western economic sanctions and asset freezes,” said Stephen Bittner, professor of Russian/Soviet and Eastern European history at Sonoma State University.

What’s more, Bittner said, “Some of the professional organisations we belong to, such as the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, have been identified as ‘undesirable’ by the Russian government.”

Relationships with Russian academics have also fractured. “There’s a big debate in Western academia about whether we should be doing anything with Russian [scholars], because they were often part of institutions whose leadership signed a letter supporting the regime’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Sahadeo. “Beyond that, the academics that you really would like to work with, the ones who we trusted and were as horrified about the invasion as we were, we didn’t want to put them in personal danger by contacting them.”

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Across the field of Russian studies, said Bittner, “The war is omnipresent. Many Western scholars with postings at Russian universities have left for reasons of personal safety or solidarity with their Ukrainian colleagues.”

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“Many Russian scholars have also fled, [for example] to Berlin, London, Paris and America. Collaborations that were under way before 2022 have slowed or stopped altogether.”

The loss of these connections is a source of particular alarm. “Collaboration with colleagues in Russia is essential to the future of area studies,” said Retish.��“When we could research together and support each other’s work at conferences and in shared projects, the field thrived. These collaborations go beyond academics – they are cultural and intellectual exchanges that are essential for maintaining dialogues.”

Academics, of course, have found ways to continue their research. “Archives are just one tool in your toolbox, and if you don’t have it, it’s too bad, but it’s not like you can’t do very effective histories of the region,” said Sahadeo, citing newspapers, oral histories and interviews as valuable alternative resources.

“For historians, there are significant collections outside of Russia,” Bittner noted. “Helsinki, which was once part of the Russian Empire, has a sizeable Russian-language library that is especially good for the period before 1917. There are large Soviet-era archival collections at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, the University of Bremen, Columbia University, and elsewhere.”

Bittner also pointed to the archives in former Soviet countries: “the Baltic republics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. They remain open, although access in some of these places has become more difficult in recent years.”

For his PhD, Bryson conducted research at the Hoover Institute as well as Columbia’s Bakhmeteff Archive; he has recently published a paper on . As for the Russian archives in which he once expected to spend months, his only access was through local researchers, who sent him photos of documents he requested. “I can’t say for sure how my PhD would have been different if I had done archival work in Russia,” he said. “It may have gone in different directions depending on what I dredged up.”

For early career researchers, he fears, the lack of archival access at the start of their careers could prove particularly disadvantageous. “Being able to cite Russian archival references has long been seen as a mark of scholarly rigour,” he said. “Without that, early career researchers have to potentially work harder and more creatively to prove their credibility, even when the barriers are beyond their control.”

Sahadeo has seen the early careers of his own students derailed: “I sent a student from my master’s programme to start a PhD, but she filed her PhD plan and she planned out her dissertation in 2021. It was going to rely on Russian archives, and now she just can’t do her project,” he said.

Without direct access to Russia, prospective PhD candidates are turning their focus elsewhere, he said. “I think we’ve lost that stream of really passionate, talented students, because part of the thrill of doing a PhD is going to the field.”

“There’s no getting around the fact that something is lost when you can’t work directly in Russian archives,” agreed Bryson. “You lose the element of discovery and the chance to find sources that may transform your argument in ways you could never have imagined.”

“But I don’t think this makes the work weaker, necessarily,” he added. “Perhaps just different.”

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emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com