When it comes to 20th-century Russia, the largest prosopographical sources are centred on some of the most catastrophic events: World War II, Stalin’s terror, and, to a lesser extent, World War I. These events involved millions of people and heavy bureaucracy. Today digitisation of these sources enables computer-aided analysis of millions of life-paths with computational methods.
Russian WWII archival data has been extensively gathered and digitised by state-funded organisations, with the Russian Ministry of Defence as the main driving force. Their OBD (‘Объединенный банк данных’, Unified data bank) now includes dozens of millions of entries from war-time conscription lists, field reports, award documents, and alike.
„Daniil Skorinkin: People between prosecution and war: record linkage in prosopographical databases of 20th-century Russia“ weiterlesen