Center for Russian, Central European and Caucasian Studies (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

The Center for Russian, Central European and Caucasian Studies was created in 1996, as a result of a scission between the Russian and Ottoman branches of a research institute founded in the 1960’s by Alexandre Bennigsen. Under the joint supervision of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), currently headed by Prof. Françoise Daucé, the Center is one of the most important centers for historical research on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in France. Its 17 tenured researchers and professors, assisted by 7 research and administrative assistants, cover a wide range of expertise, with a focus on war and violence in Soviet and post-Soviet history.
One research branch is constituted by historians of Soviet mass violence and deportations, whose work is partially reflected on the website www.gulagmemories.eu, one of the results of the collective project “European Memories of the Gulag”. The second branch consists of historians of the Second World War, especially the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union and its consequences: research is conducted on the Soviet partisan movement, on the State Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Nazi War Crimes and on the Soviet government’s treatment of Soviet collaborators with Nazi Germany a topic which was also investigated in the collective research project “Nazi War Crimes on Trial: Central & Eastern Europe”.
Visual history has been part of many CERCEC projects and is the topic of the research seminar “Visual Cultures: A Comparative History of the Soviet Gaze”, held at CERCEC since 2015. CERCEC has also been the main partner of Valérie Pozner’s project “CINESOV – Soviet Cinema at War, 1939–1949”, including the exhibition “Filming the War. Soviet cameras confront the Holocaust, 1941–1946” in Paris at Mémorial de la Shoah in 2015.

Role in the Project

CERCEC leads the task of identifying and digitizing Holocaust-related filmic documents in post-Soviet archives in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. CERCEC is also responsible for identifying and digitizing photographs and relevant textual documents in these countries. With its long-standing expertise, the CERCEC team annotates and explores these documents, thus contributing to a better understanding of this little-known part of the Holocaust and its visual traces.