COLD WAR RESEARCH CENTRE

in the pub; it was only 2 hours, a good month before the trip, but it took the edge off

working together. It also made getting accommodation together much less of a hassle. I

think it can be hard to get a sense of people's housing priorities, budgets, requirements and

red lines when you've never met them face-to-face.

We ended up with great accommodation and got on really well, and neither of those things

is exclusively because we went to Turf in June - but I was less worried about both, having

done that. Implicit in the above: getting accommodation together can be really nice! Made

bills and socialising much easier. Double-check your health insurance if you've not travelled

since Brexit, invest in a monthly student transit card if on an internship in Budapest... but

yes I think meeting up is the main thing. All the little irritations of travelling and living

abroad are easier if you know the people.

Olena Tian, Masters-level student, MA Russian and East European Studies, Remote working

Work Projects

I was mainly working with the Open Society

Archives entries my main duty was to write

their short summaries and compile a

document with them. The Cold War Center is

going to publish their updated Chronology of

the Cold War Part 1 (1945-1952) in December,

therefore most urgently they need more archival entries to be processed. I was also given a

task to find 15 events during the Cold War for their Facebook project On this day.

All Oxford interns were also asked to analyze a chapter on Eastern Europe during the early

years of the Cold War from The Cambridge History of the Cold War. We then had an

extremely interesting discussion with professor Csaba BKS on the events in Poland, Hungary,

East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in 1945-1968. During the whole time of my internship,

we were in touch with the Centers coordinators Simon and Marco, who were supervising

our work and helping with any questions we had.

Daily Life

My internship was online, so I had to have strict

time management since our work was not

restricted by any schedule. We would usually

have just one virtual meeting every Thursday, so

I could manage my schedule the way I wanted, it

was very convenient. Just before the internship

started, I moved to Estonia, so in my free hours, I would usually go explore its capital,

Tallinn. It was especially interesting since I was working with a lot of archival entries from

the Soviet Union, and Estonia in particular. Reading about a part of the history of the

country you just moved into was fascinating.

I would usually start working around 10-11, then take a break during the afternoon around

2-3, and would work 3-4 hours in the evening. On the weekend, I would usually take breaks

and explore the city. Since I had just moved here, I had to work a lot from cafes and coffee

shops (I did not have a desk in my place yet), but after a strict lockdown last spring in

Oxford, it felt nice to be able to go to cafes and enjoy seeing people around me. Overall, I

think I managed to have a nice routine and got used to working remotely.

Lasting Impressions

The internship was incredibly interesting and useful for me. The basis of my master’s thesis

was the newly declassified archival materials from Ukraine, therefore I really enjoyed

working with data from the Open Society Archives. I gained new knowledge from the early

period of the Cold War and improved my understanding of the period in general.

I especially liked reading about the history of the Baltic countries after WW2. It was

incredibly useful to practice working with archival entries. I also liked our discussion meeting

on Eastern Europe with the Cold War Founding Director Professor Scaba BKS. This internship

made me realize that I miss academic discussions and working in academia, in general, a lot,

and now I am thinking more seriously about applying for DPhil in History.