Lecture by Bartłomiej Gajos: “Continuity or Rupture? What Data Science Reveals about Russia’s Politics of Memory during the Russo-Ukrainian War”

November 12, 2025 • 5:00-6:30 PM ET (hybrid)
Room K-262, CGIS-Knafel, Harvard University & Online
More info: Events | Ukrainian Research Institute

In this compelling lecture, Gajos — currently Senior Research Fellow at the Juliusz Mieroszewski Centre for Dialogue (Poland) and a former Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow — uses cutting-edge data science tools (text-mining, sentiment-mapping, co-occurrence analysis) to show how the Russian state has shifted its politics of memory from retrospective myth-making about World War II to real-time sacralisation of its ongoing war narrative.

Bartłomiej Gajos is a historian of the Soviet Union and Russia whose work explores how power uses, distorts, and reinterprets history. He earned a PhD degree at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAN) for his thesis Politics of Memory of the Early Bolshevik Regime, 1917–1921. Currently, he combines archival research with data science methods to understand how narratives are shaped and contested. His research focuses on the politics of memory in contemporary Russia (1991–2025). He is the author of the recent article “Imperialism and Ethnonationalism in Russia’s Turbulent Years (1989–1994) – How Narratives of Unjust Borders Shaped Putin’s ‘Time Bomb’ Metaphor”, published in Nationalities Papers (2025).