Revisiting the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System

Between 1949 and 1951, scholars from Harvard University's Russian Research Center conducted over 700 interviews with Soviet displaced persons and émigrés. Rather than audio record the conversations, which took place in Russian or Ukrainian, interviewers wrote detailed notes throughout the interviews and recorded their notes in English. The only surviving records are the nonverbatim transcripts of the interviewers' audio recordings. For the most part, contemporary Soviet historians use the Harvard Project transcripts as "depositories of fact." In this article, I argue that when we read the transcripts closely and with a mind to their context, we can look beyond what the respondents recalled to examine how Soviet émigrés actively remembered the past. Framed as sources of oral history, the Harvard Project transcripts offer rich and novel insights into how post-World War II Soviet émigrés made sense of their pasts.