📌 Our Mission
Uniting Generations (Uni-Gen) is an international, non-profit digital humanities project dedicated to preserving, digitizing, and providing free public access to the literary and memoir heritage of the First Wave of Russian emigration (“The White Exodus”) after the 1917 Revolution.
Our core mission is to bridge the generational and linguistic gap. Thousands of descendants of those who fled to Europe, Australia, and the Americas no longer speak or read Russian. By digitizing these unique memoirs and integrating advanced AI/OCR technologies, we unlock forgotten history, allowing grandchildren and great-grandchildren to read their ancestors’ life stories in English, Serbian, French, or any other European language.
🏛️ Decades of Research and Unique Heritage
The founder of the project, Igor Nikolaevich, has dedicated decades to archival work, book publishing, and preserving cultural heritage globally—from Vladivostok to Sydney, Australia (including the digitization of the historical archives of the Russian Club in Stratfield).
Over the years, the project has established personal collaborations and recorded invaluable historical testimonies from key figures of the Russian diaspora and European history, including:
- Prince Nikolai Romanov (Head of the Romanov Family Association)
- Nikita Struve (Prominent French slavist, publisher, and professor)
- Aleksandr Plotto (Naval historian and researcher of the Russian fleet exodus)
- Kirill Makhrov (Diplomat, historian, and researcher of European migration)
- The grandson of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak
- Pavel Bulygin (Poet and investigator of the Romanov family fate)
- Nikita Moravsky (Diplomat, cultural figure, and writer)
Though these historic individuals are no longer with us, their legacy is preserved on our platform to serve future generations.
🌐 Technology and Accessibility
The uni-gen.org platform functions as an open-access digital library. We transform rare, fragile publications and private family archives into high-quality digital formats.
- Advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition): We process vintage typography, including pre-reform orthography, turning scanned images into searchable text.
- Instant AI Translation: Our text layers are optimized for automatic modern translation tools. Descendants and international historians can read any digitized memoir in their native language in just one click.
🇲🇪 Balkan Chapter & European Integration
The history of the 20th-century European migration is deeply intertwined with the Balkans. Countries like Montenegro (the Kingdom of SHS) showed immense European solidarity by becoming a safe haven for thousands of refugees, doctors, engineers, and military families after 1917.
As Montenegro moves toward EU accession, Uni-Gen is actively expanding its operations in the Balkan region. Our current goals include:
- Field Expeditions (Herceg Novi, Kotor, Cetinje): Locating and digitizing surviving private libraries and memoirs kept by local families of emigrant descent.
- Institutional Partnerships: Collaborating with the State Archives of Montenegro and local cultural centers to assist in the professional digitizing of historical migration funds.
- NGO Formation: Establishing a local non-profit organization (NVO) in Montenegro to access European cultural heritage grants (Creative Europe, Erasmus+).
🤝 Contact and Collaboration
We welcome cooperation with historians, genealogists, Slavic departments of European universities, state archives, and direct descendants of the First Wave emigration. If you possess rare memoirs, family journals, or migration periodics that need to be digitized and saved for future generations, please contact us.
- Founder & Director: Igor Petrenko
- Website:uni-gen.org
- Email: bazar454070@gmail.com
- Phone / WhatsApp / Telegram: +7-914-665-1883