Paul Goble
Staunton,
January 17 – Public history, the trend within the history discipline in many
places around the world that seeks to rely on the digitalization of personal
memoirs, diaries, and photographs of ordinary people to present the past from
below, has come to Russia and is “democratizing memory” in that country,
according to a new study.
Yekaterina
Lapina-Kratasyuk and Milena Rubleva of the Higher School of Economics have
explored how such materials are affecting what they call “the culture of
participation” (“Preservation Projects of Personal Memory” in Russian, Shagi, 4:3-4(2018): 147-168 at publications.hse.ru/articles/221903234; summarized
at iq.hse.ru/news/231962189.html).
They
considered ten of the most-visited online digital archives that have assembled
materials about the main tragedies of Russia in the 20th century – the
revolution, Stalinism and mass repressions – to explore the ways this history
from below challenges the various and changing official narratives from
above.
Most
of these digital archives are separate from the state in another way: they are
the work of volunteers and raise money for themselves by crowd-sourcing. As
such, they destroy the monopoly on such history formerly enjoyed by the state
and professional histories and encourage people to view the past through their
own lives rather than through what they are taught.
They
are extremely diverse. Among them are collections of interviews (“Oral History”),
personal diaries (“What I lived through”), family histories (“Siberians Free
and Unfree”), virtual museums (“European Memory about the GULAG”), photographs
(“PastVu” and “History of Russia in Photographs”), martyrologies, and others.
Like
almost everything else in Russia, these are highly centralized: nine of the ten
they examined are based in Moscow; only one beyond the ring road. It is in
Tomsk. Unfortunately, the two
investigators relate, local history is as yet less often the object of attention
by Russian digital history.
Many
of these archives are based in universities and government archives, but
because of the way they are financed and the nature of the people behind them,
the scholars continue, they are “privatizing history,” “democratizing memory,”
and allowing for the appearance of a research-backed “alternative memory” of
key events.
They
are also integrating these popular projects directly into international
cooperation efforts such as Le Centre d’études des
mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen at https://www.cercec.fr/
and Radio France International.
The sites they
examined include:
Oral
History at http://oralhistory.ru/
What
I have lived Through at prozhito.org/
European
Memory about the GULAG at museum.gulagmemories.eu/
The
Obninsk Digital Project at obninsk-project.net/
Siberians
Free and Unfree at сибиряки.онлайн/
PastView
at pastvu.com/
Reliquary
at relikva.com/
The
Immortal Barracks at https://bessmertnybarak.ru/
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