Soviet Data Digitization and Contextualization

Introduction

Starting in August 2025, I began collecting, digitizing, and contextualizing data on Russia and the Soviet Union for the KGB Lab’s website. This blog post serves as a reflection on why I chose to analyze many of the sources, as well as a commentary on the importance of viewing quantitative data and the challenges faced when digitizing, contextualizing, and displaying statistical data.

Why Discuss Information on Soviet Informants

Soviet informant information was among the first I analyzed because of its ties to the broader purpose of the KGB Lab. Informants and the information they provided could appear in interrogations and could lead to arrests. I believed the data on the number of informants was critical because it could help historians analyze why there might have been more arrests at a given time. The many possibilities offered by the information on Soviet informants made it valuable to me, which is why I decided to add it to the KGB Lab website.

Focusing on Latvian KGB Recruitment

The decision to focus on KGB Recruitment in Latvia was based on the idea that it could give input on the make-up of KGB agencies, providing valuable information when compared with KGB interrogations. The characteristics of Latvian agents, I felt, could be useful to historians using the Q&A database in finding biases the interrogators might have held. The many ties between the data and the KGB Lab’s purpose are why I felt it was important to include this data and provide the context necessary to understand it.

Digitizing Communist Party Membership information

Choosing to contextualize Communist Party data was based on my belief that the Party would have controlled much of Soviet society, and membership data could reflect its approval among civilians. The data on why memberships were revoked, I believed, could be helpful to historians who want to understand why so many members stopped paying their dues or were expelled from the party. I felt the table’s context would help historians decide which data was easier to explain and which was worth further analysis.

Why Contextualize and Digitize Older Data

I felt as though George Kennan’s book on the Siberian exile system, though dated, provided valuable data on the Russian penal system. While older data can be inaccurate, I decided to digitize and contextualize this source because I felt that it could show how Russians of the time may have viewed the penal system. This source stood out because of the role secret police played in the Russian penal system, and I believed the information on exiled individuals could provide insightful data into the crimes and punishments in Russia. Despite the unreliability of dated data, it can still be helpful to historians, as previously mentioned, which is why I felt it important to provide historians with easier access to the data by digitizing Kennan’s statistics.

Quantitative and Qualitative Data

The posts on Soviet data have focused on contextualizing and digitizing quantitative data, providing an essential view of history that is less obscured by bias. When viewing qualitative accounts of history, we are limited to the author’s understanding and are subject to viewing it through their biases. Comparing these qualitative accounts with the statistical data digitized in the posts allows us to use statistics to assess an author’s credibility or to identify an extreme bias that clouds reality. The practice of using statistics to decipher history is especially important when reviewing Soviet history and the history of secret police, which were rarely discussed or written about. I believe that analyzing quantitative data is the easiest way to obtain the most accurate information on secretive agencies or governments, such as the Soviet Union.

Challenges Faced While Working with the Data

While working with the data, I found that some sources gave little background information for less significant tables. When contextualizing these tables, I would examine outside sources to find relevant information that could relate to the data. When reviewing the Communist Party Membership data, I drew on my knowledge of Soviet history to explain why certain dips and spikes occurred. For instance, I consulted sources on important dates and events, such as Lenin’s death, Stalin’s rise to power, the five-year plans, and World War II, to help me give better context for the U.S.S.R.’s situation during the data’s time frame. I found it essential to review external sources when contextualizing the data, especially when little context was provided in the original source.

There was also the issue of deciding how to present the data in an easily digestible way. I constantly found myself debating whether to keep the data as a table, turn it into a line graph, or use any other visual aid. Tables were kept for data that I felt had critical information that would have been excluded if visualized using anything other than a table. This was the case for the data on penal classification of the Siberian exiles, where the most important data was the penal class, but the data also included subclasses that specified the type of sentence an exiled individual received. It would have been challenging to create a graph that showed both the classes and their subclasses, so I chose to present the data in a table. To make the data easier to understand, I decided to use visual aids whenever possible to show the data in its entirety while keeping the visuals clean and straightforward.