Adalet Project Reconvenes: Decoding KGB Files on the Indigenous Peoples of Crimea
12 November 2025
The Adalet Team is back at work!
From 20-28 October 2025, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) hosted Dr. Andriy Kohut, Director of the Sectoral State Archives of the Security Services of Ukraine (HDA SBU), at the University of Alberta. The visit was part of the second quarterly workshop of the Adalet project.
During the week, the two partner institutions – CIUS, represented by Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and HDA SBU, represented by Andriy Kohut – held multiple project meetings with fifteen project members to advance the ongoing work of the project.
What is the Adalet Project?
In Crimean Tatar, Adalet means “justice”. We are deeply grateful to Mr. Refat Chubarov, the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, and our Indigenous Crimean Tatar partners in Ukraine and around the world for endorsing this word as a symbolic code name for our initiative, formally titled “Undoing the language of the KGB files: collaborative partnership for archival justice and the Indigenous peoples of (Soviet) Ukraine (1944-1991).”
Launched in partnership with HDA-SBU, the Adalet Project explores how the Soviet secret services used bureaucratic and ideological language to criminalize, repress, and erase the Crimean Tatars and other Indigenous peoples of Crimea between 1944 and 1991.
At its core, the project focuses on AI-enhanced analysis of KGB archival documents, combining advanced text recognition (OCR/HTR), search, and metadata technologies with ethical and historical reflection.
Our shared goal is to make these complex and often painful historical sources more accessible for scholars, communities, and the broader public, in literal and linguistic terms. By integrating digital innovation, ethical protocols, and cross-institutional collaboration, the Adalet Project aims to illuminate the language of repression and restore agency and voice to those it sought to silence.
In this new phase, the project focuses on building workflows, improving text recognition (OCR/HTR), and developing indexing and metadata systems that support ethical and transparent access to the archives.
Towards Archival Sovereignty of Ukraine
The collaboration between CIUS and HDA SBU is grounded in our shared commitment to Ukraine’s archival and data sovereignty. Our project advances ethical, transnational, and international cooperation – without one-way transfers of archival data.
Instead, we are working to build digital infrastructures that strengthen Ukraine’s sovereignty over its documentary heritage while fostering global scholarly access under Ukrainian stewardship.
We look forward to sharing the insights emerging from our collaboration as well as from the archives, revealing the human stories behind the files.
Adalet Team
We extend our warmest thanks to our colleagues and partners for our ongoing collaboration:
Denilson Barbosa, Larysa Bilous, Peter Blinkley, Kostyantyn Bondarenko, Maryna Cherniavska, Adam Hradilek, Oleksii Ihnatenko, Pavel Ircing, Andriy Kohut, Tymur Lavrenchuk, Sean Lis, Nara Narimanova, Serhii Plokhy, Geoffrey Rockwell, John Simpson, and Oleh Turij, as well as everyone contributing to our discussions and workshops.
With Special Thanks To
- Crimea Platform
- the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, and
- the Global Coalition of Ukrainian Studies
for their continued support and partnership.