Personal Files: AI Is Bringing Pre-Revolutionary Archives Online in Russia's Tambov Region
The Tambov Region has launched a project to digitize the first 117 pre-revolutionary and early Soviet archival collections using neural networks. Once complete, people will be able to trace the history of their families, hometowns, and ancestors by searching surnames and localities.
Until now, these archival records were available only in reading rooms through individual requests. Research required in-person visits, significant time, and assistance from archive staff. In recent years, however, interest has expanded beyond professional historians to include people eager to learn more about their own family histories. Digitizing the collections will make the materials broadly accessible, while neural networks are expected to make the conversion process faster and more productive.
A Shared Effort
In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Mintsifry (Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media), Rosarkhiv (Federal Archival Agency), and the Russian Academy of Sciences to develop proposals for digitizing documents from the Archival Fund using artificial intelligence technologies.
A year later, Yandex launched its Poisk po arkhivam (Archive Search) service, powered by a neural network capable of interpreting historical handwriting and pre-revolutionary spelling. At launch, the platform provided access to more than 2.5 million pages from archives in Moscow, Orenburg, and Novgorod. By 2024, the AI had processed more than 10 million pages and 492 million lines of historical text. The service expanded to archival collections from 11 Russian regions, and users viewed documents more than 20 million times.
Despite that progress, only about 5% to 6% of Russia's archival documents have been digitized so far, highlighting the need to accelerate the effort. Each region is contributing to that broader initiative. The Tambov Region has signed a cooperation agreement with Yandex to expand public access to archival records through online services.
"In practice, the project is being implemented through the Tambov Region's participation in Yandex's Poisk po arkhivam, a public online platform that brings together digitized archival materials from different regions of Russia. The Tambov Region is among the first regions whose archival collections are being systematically added to the platform," said Deputy Governor Nikolai Fedoseenkov.
From Medical Records to Police Payrolls
The project covers a total of 117 archival collections dating from the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet periods. Neural networks will decipher handwritten documents and pre-revolutionary orthography, substantially reducing the time required for digitization. During the first phase alone, the Tambov Region plans to digitize more than 67,000 archival files and nearly 10,000 handwritten pages using AI.
The collections include records from district police departments, land management commissions, treasury offices, religious schools, zemstvo hospitals, and factories. They also contain personnel service records for police officials, payroll registers for city police officers and rural constables, as well as documents from the Tambov Provincial Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) dating to the Russian Civil War.
Many members of the public are likely to be most interested in another category of documents: parish registers. These hundreds of volumes record births, marriages, and deaths across parishes in the former Tambov Governorate and have long served as the foundation of genealogical research. They will allow users to build their own family trees.
The digitized records will not remain dormant in cloud storage. Instead, they will serve as the foundation for educational, museum, and memorial projects designed to help residents of the Tambov Region better understand the history of both their region and Russia as a whole.
Toward Automated Family Trees and Historical Maps
Yandex's Poisk po arkhivam has evolved into a multiregional platform. Its growth from 2.5 million pages in 2023 to more than 20 million pages by 2026 reflects the service's growing popularity. Looking ahead, the technology could unify regional archival collections into a single searchable environment, support genealogy and local history services, and provide high-quality historical sources for training Russian language models.
The Tambov initiative reflects a broader shift from simple document scanning to creating fully searchable, structured digital archives. These technologies can transform inaccessible, difficult-to-read historical documents into resources that people can easily search, read, and work with.
Over the next several years, more regions, libraries, and museums are expected to join similar platforms. New capabilities could also emerge, including automated family tree generation, historical maps, name indexes, and tools for identifying relationships among people, organizations, and places.
