Research Commissions – Together We Can Achieve More

The Sybir Memorial Museum initiates and participates in international historical research projects. Given the fate of Polish deportees, tens of thousands of whom were sent to Russian Central Asia and later to the Soviet republics located in this part of the world, access to local archives and scholarly publications became essential.

The most effective way of overcoming the logistical and political barriers hindering this objective has proved to be the involvement of an international group of specialists.

The Sybir Memorial Museum, together with the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, initiated the establishment of the following historical commissions: the Polish-Kazakh Historical Commission (2022), the Polish-Uzbek Historical Commission (2023) and the Polish-Kyrgyz Historical Commission (2025). Each commission brings together historians, archivists and representatives of other academic disciplines from the countries concerned.

The Polish side is represented by historians from the Sybir Memorial Museum and the Museum of the Second World War, as well as researchers from various institutes and universities. Representing Kazakhstan are researchers from the Institute of History and Ethnology at the Science Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Almaty, as well as archivists from numerous state archives.

Uzbekistan is represented by researchers from Mirza Uluğ-Beg National University of Uzbekistan in Tashkent, while Kyrgyzstan is represented by researchers from Yusuf Balasaghuni Kyrgyz National University in Bishkek. Despite the relatively short period of activity of these commissions, this approach has resulted in a rich exchange of information and the acquisition of numerous copies of archival materials and source publications unavailable in Poland.

Joint publications have been produced to disseminate the knowledge gained and the materials collected. An archival and historical portal, “From the Archives of Central Asia”, has also been launched. It is available in Polish and English, while some documents are published in the original Russian language. Importantly, thanks to an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine, the collected archival materials can be searched automatically in all three languages. The “Central Asia” portal, in turn, presents the current activities of the aforementioned commissions.