I also wanted to mention a site that might be interesting for intermediate and advanced Russian learners, or those with such students, as well as those who are fond of Russian pop culture. It is called RUSSIANCHAT, a videopodcast for learning Russian. The site uses a variety of audio-visual materials to introduce learners to a wide range of Russian language and culture. Each entry consists of a few introductory paragraphs and a clip of 3-10 minutes. Beginning with elementary language scenes, it includes a wide range of great clips from youtube, from a 1944 cartoon rendition of Kornei Chukovsky’s Telephone to a TV special about Yury Kuklachev’s cat circus. The most recent post presents an excerpt from Leonid Parfyonov’s take on the Chernobyl meltdown from his show Намеди. What will probably be most helpful for students and useful for teachers (as well as interesting for both) are the author’s terrific introductions that provide both linguistic and cultural context. In some cases these include key phrases or complete translations. The author of the site is Dr. Svitlana Malykina.

Even when I’m looking for something specific, though, I find myself randomly reading other laws in large part because they tell me things I didn’t know.  I learn that Peter the Great made a law to restrict the sale of wax candles for use in churches to the churches themselves, and forbade the practice of random other people selling such candles on the street outside churches. Or I learn that Anna was so upset to hear that people were being trampled by people galloping through the streets of St. Petersburg (on horses, of course) that she banned galloping in the city–and furthermore announced that anyone caught galloping would be punished by being beaten with the cat-o-nine-tails “mercilessly.”

And then there’s Catherine the Great. Now, obviously, she was a woman who liked laws, what with her famous “legislomania” and all that. But she also had a thing for commemorating major events (military victories, putting up the Bronze Horseman [yes, really]) by releasing Manifestos to All Her People, granting them all sorts of things.  One in particular shows up in a number of discussions of her reign.  On March 17, 1775, in honor of making peace with the Ottoman Empire, she released a Manifesto giving “mercies to various sosloviia” in recognition of God’s mercy in granting her and her state victory, peace, and the respect of other nations. She wondered (she wrote) how best to honor that divine intervention, and decided that according to the Lord’s words, He preferred mercy to sacrifice, and so mercy she would give.  Forty seven “mercies” then follow…  (see the original post for citations).

Google images is of course a natural place to start searching for pictures.  One useful feature is a setting on its Advanced Search page that lets you specify whether you want to find materials that is free to use or share, free to modify, or even free for commercial use.

The AHA blog has written a number of articles on online image resources, but only a few are relevant to Russia and Soviet topics.  One is the LIFE magazine photo archive; particularly interesting to me were Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs from the Soviet Union in 1941.  Another resource that has potential to grow is The Commons on Flikr.

If I had to recommend just one website, it would be 17 Moments in Soviet History, an “online archive of primary source materials on Soviet history.”  While it is far from an exhaustive source of images, they are all fully cited and presented in context.  Many of the images are drawn from and linked to other on-line repositories.  The site also includes audio and video files.

The Digital Gallery of Historical Photos – Russia from the NY Public Library includes many fully scanned albums of photos from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Blogger Dmitri Minaev recently flagged a beautiful and growing online collection of photos by classic photographers, including Alexander Rodchenko and Maxim Dmitriev.

Speaking of blogs, English Russia is made up almost entirely of photographs, sometimes on historical subjects.  For instance, one post is dedicated to Maxim Dmitriev’s photographs of late 19^th century Russia.  Another post is dedicated to the wide range of Russian currency notes around the time of the revolution.  It seems as if the blog often consists of reader submissions, but unfortunately citation information is rarely presented.  And a word of warning: the adverts on this site can be rather obnoxious.

Finally, there are some great photographs in a recent Foreign Affairs review of David King’s Red Star Over Russia.

The site currently facilitates self-guided instruction in ten languages, including Russian.

As an advanced student of Russian, what was most interesting to me was the library of various types of podcasts and other audio programs, which are presented along with the full text in Russian. The library includes a variety of materials, including newscasts from Ekho Moskvy and Voice of America, audio books such as Tolstoy’s Detstvo and excerpts from Anna Karenina, and original programming specific to language learning with topics ranging from travel to business etc. Moreover, it seems to be quite easy for any user to add content to the site, as long as both audio and text are included.

The most exciting technical function of the site, however, is that it tracks the progress of your learning. By registering for an account (free), the website keeps a personal profile of the texts that you have read/listened to. If you come across a word that you don’t know, a scroll-over feature allows you to see the word’s definition(s) as well as to see any other clues or definitions that users have entered in the past. If you like, you can add new clues or other information, which will then be available to anyone learning the word, and you can save the word to your profile for further study (there is a cute flash card option for reviewing these words). Furthermore, the same word will from then on be highlighted when you’re reading until you decide that you’ve learned the word. It’s worth noting that this function only works for single words; expressions such as “travit’ baiki” (bol’tat’, rasskazyvat’ anekdoty) are not identified by the program, as far as I could tell.

More broadly, the site aims to create a language learning community by encouraging users to interact and by providing a broad range of other fee-based services (tutors, live conversations vis-a-vis skype, discussion forums, more developed courses as well as an option to submit your writing for correction). There are various levels of paid membership, and by contributing to the site you get free credits.

In terms of presentation, I found the site very functional. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it beautiful, but it’s certainly not overloaded with advertisements. But I did find the ubiquitous spring green banner promoting the $10/month plan somewhat tiresome. Audio files seem to come as mp3 downloads.

But all in all, this is the most interesting language-learning site I’ve ever come across. Its founder, Steven Kaufmann, is an also active participant on the site. He is the author of The Way of the Linguist (2005) and a blog called ‘the linguist on language.’

Does anyone have experience, positive or negative, with other online language learning sites?

Topics include: Document collections, writings of party leaders, biographies, foreign diplomatic sources, travelers’ accounts, and soviet publications.  When appropriate, the lists are divided between materials available at Harvard and those available elsewhere.  There is a link to a couple other general bibliographies, and it seems as if more bibliographies and links may be added in the future.  One thing that might be added to the site is a list of English subtitled Russian/Soviet films.

The site is intended specifically for serious students, but it should be useful for researchers as well.

Seth Bernstein, a doctoral student in history at the University of Toronto, interned with the Sakharov Center in 2004 as a transcriber, and then used their database for his senior thesis.  I interviewed him about his experience using it.

10.5.2009

Seth: alright, what would you like to know?

me: What is the center’s web address?

Seth: http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/.  For some reason it’s been having problems and trying to go to the search engine doesn’t get you anywhere. [March 2010 - Now it seems that the search function has been removed-AB].

me: It’s a shame that the site isn’t working!  … I’m curious, how representative is the online part of their overall holdings? Do you know if there were many memoirs still unprocessed in their archives? (I see from their site that they now have 827 memoirs).  Do they have a mission to provide 100% of their memoirs online?

Seth: Of course they would like to provide access to 100% of the memoirs but my guess from their selection and my experience with them, is that they take memoirs that were easy to digitize, very famous or unique.  So they have, for example, Anna Larina’s memoir as well as unpublished materials… just based on my searches I found that they have some pretty obscure memoirs.

me: Are the originals accessible at the Sakharov center?

Seth: I’m not sure. I worked with a copy of the handwritten memoir. I imagine that it depends on which memoir you are talking about. They do have an archive there, though.

me: Is the “meta information” about the memoirs complete? (i.e. author, date of submission, any other information that could help contextualize them?).

Seth: This also depends on the author.  Some have really complete biographies and others just have a date of birth and a very brief bio like their profession and maybe one or two cities where they lived.  That said, I found that information sufficient for figuring our whether a memoir would be useful or not at a glance after I did a wider search.

me: I’m curious about your experience using the database for your undergrad thesis.

Seth: at first it seemed difficult to find some kind of organizing principle, so I ended up using the search engine quite a bit.  So, I would search for, say, “Saratov” in the body of the text and then based on their biographical information it would be clear whether they would have relevant information in their writings.  I was interested mostly in people who had been in the Saratov prison in 1937-39.  So if I came up with Solzhenitsyn, who may have mentioned Saratov somewhere in passing, I was pretty certain I could skip him

me: Impressive, that out of 827 memoirs there were a couple who spent time in Saratov prison, 1937-1939.

Seth: Well that’s how I came to the topic.  I wanted to limit my focus to a specific town or region. So I just looked for places which came up with a lot of memoirs and Saratov had a surprisingly large number.  I recall there being 4 who spent some time there and a few others who passed through in transit

me: Just chance that there were so many, I guess?

Seth: That was part of it, but there were other factors that made it more likely that people would generate memoirs from Saratov. For example, many people were exiled from Leningrad after the Kirov assassination to Saratov.

me: When you were using the database for your thesis, was there anything problematic about the memoirs as a source?

Seth: I found that some of the authors stuck to what you would consider the typical tropes of the Gulag. A very romanticized version of interrogation with the interrogator sometimes falling in love with a woman

me: Anything else you would like to add about the online database as a resource for historians?

Seth: I wouldn’t recommend relying on it as the major source of a dissertation (or senior thesis) but the search logic is the same as with any other engine and it’s pretty surprising how much you can turn up and how little effort it takes.

me: By the way, have the memoirs been converted to text then, or can you see images of the original memoirs?

Seth: They are all in the database as text.  It would be great to have the originals, but I’m sure that would take up too much space.

me: Transcribing must be a lot of work

Seth: It is, I got through about 150 pages in the course of a semester, and they only have 4 or 5 volunteers

me: Would you recommend the internship for young enthusiastic Russian learners?

Seth: Of course! It is incredibly helpful for your Russian and you learn how to type in Russian, which is a surprisingly useful skill.

me: I’m going to keep an eye on their site, and try it out once it gets back online.

Seth: I may try to get in contact with them for the year after next

me: Thanks Seth!
Seth: not a problem

There are a number of sections for history graduate students, which cover the profession in general,  funding, useful software, filing taxes, ethics, reading, writing, style & citation, oral history and online resources and forums.  Topics specifically for Russianists include archives, libraries, & catalogs, online dictionaries & encyclopedias, guides to the soviet archives, laws & regulations of the Russia, bibliographies, academic journals, professional organizations, museums, exhibits and memorials as well as a list of many prominent people in the field.

One such site is the Digital Research Tools Wiki, affectionately known as DiRT. The site promises to collect

information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

Despite the fact that the site is very new (there was a sneak preview in May, 2008), it is packed with information, especially lists of software. For those seeking to move way beyond microsoft word, mozilla, google mail and excel, this is a very useful site.

This wiki is a very effective “directory of tools.” It provides immediate access to comprehensive lists of the many resources out there to accomplish whatever task you might be interested in (выполнить и перевыполнить!). But the site, at least at its current level, is not such a convincing “reviewer.” The reviews come last: that is, you first choose a category of interest, then a resource, and only then do you find out if it has been discussed in a useful way. Clicking on a number of the items simply took me to their websites, which I could just have easily have found by searching.

Another wiki with a lot of potential is the American History Association’s Archives Wiki, “intended to be a clearinghouse of information about archival resources throughout the world.” I think it was created in 2007, and at least judging from the section on Russia, the wiki is just getting started. Only RGASPI has been included. Success will depend on more of us getting involved. As for me, there’s something a little too impersonal about the wiki format when it takes on such grand tasks. We have yet to see if, as a brief article from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog suggests, the Wiki has run out of steam.

In any case, I’m happy with the blog format for now.