In the European Union area, cultural heritage digitisation is inextricably linked to strengthening a sense of European identity and embedded in a digital agenda that “seeks to <anchor xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" xml:id="Hlk77262631" />optimise the benefits of information technologies for economic growth, job creation and the quality of life of European citizens” (Commission Recommendation 2011). Supranational projects such as Europeana and Time Machine both frame themselves as contributing to a European common identity and history. In the latter case, a video created as part of a marketing campaign explicitly suggested Europe was at a turning point in its history and the Time Machine project would act as savior of a mythical occidental European enlightened past and enabler of a common history (Time Machine Trailer 2019). In Western Europe, where digital resources are comparatively plenty, debates about the effects of digitisation on historical scholarship are relatively muted. In Eastern Europe and Russia, however, the politics of digital heritage are of greater scholarly concern within a context where historians face increasing political pressures, if not active censorship and obstruction (Golubev 2021).