“As authoritarian regimes worldwide escalate their assault on independent media, PEN America and Bard College today announced the launch of Kronika, a new digital platform designed to safeguard journalism globally and ensure that the historical record cannot be obliterated by censorship. The initiative is an expansion of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), which PEN America and Bard College launched in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After three years of focusing primarily on Russian-language media, the project is now providing its expertise and technical solutions for the preservation of media in any language. “What began as a response to escalating censorship in one country is evolving into a global institution to protect independent media everywhere,” said Ilia Venyavkin, Kronika’s director of programs. “With Kronika, we’re opening our tools and partnerships beyond Russia—to any newsroom or civic initiative confronting erasure—so facts remain verifiable, stories remain findable, and history remains public. The project began when independent Russian outlets were shut down or forced into exile, leaving virtually no independent media operating inside the country. Since 2022, the RIMA project team has built an end-to-end digital preservation pipeline that ingests, processes, and makes materials searchable in both Russian and English, enabling rapid discovery and reuse by journalists, researchers, and the public. It has preserved a total of 149 independent media archives to date. As RIMA began receiving requests from journalists eager to protect archives in other countries, the project expanded, and was renamed Kronika, meaning “chronicle” in Russian, honoring the ground-breaking periodical The Chronicle of Current Events, which documented Soviet human rights abuses from 1968 to 1983 despite immense risks..”