Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2005-08-31NLO-No. 004

SUMMARY

INSTITUTIONS OF MEMORY: ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES IN PRESENT-DAY RUSSIA
This special issue of the New Literary Review focuses on the profound 
institutional crisis in Russia's archive and library systems, its social and 
cultural significance and consequences. This is a unique project. Over the 
last few years, Russia has seen a wealth of studies into collective 
historical memory, yet the institutional aspect of this problem has never 
yet been the subject of extensive analysis.

The issue opens with a 'Chronicle of Recent Events' compiled by Tatiana 
Volovelskaya (Russian State Library, Moscow) and Abram Reitblat (New 
Literary Review magazine, Moscow) with the assistance of Grigory Smolitsky 
(New Literary Review, Moscow). Looking at what the last ten years have 
brought Russian libraries and archives, the authors conclude that disasters 
including thefts, fires, floods and evictions by far outnumbered positive 
occurrences such as donations, the construction of new buildings or 
renovation of existing premises.

MEMORY - POWER - RESEARCH
Turning to the state of the humanities in Russia, Victor Zhivov (Institute 
of Russian Language, Moscow, and University of California, Berkeley) claims 
that the present situation is entirely different to that under the Soviet 
regime and in the years immediately after its demise. The Soviet authorities 
supported the humanities as an important ideological tool, at the same time 
considerably restricting the scope and freedom of research. Perestroika 
brought the academic community freedom and an entirely new role in society. 
Academics were credited with the potential to discover Russia's true destiny 
and legitimise the new life and new history. The author claims that this 
period has ended. Having no further need of humanitarian research, the 
current leadership accords academia ornamental status only. In these 
circumstances, leading intellectuals must re-evaluate their relationship 
with the authorities, increase their exchange with society and create a new 
paradigm of survival.

In his article 'Archives and Simplicity', Alexei Levinson (Moscow's Levada 
Centre) outlines two tendencies prevalent in contemporary Russia. The first 
is to be observed among the cultural minority, who tend to develop more 
sophisticated social communication and concepts of society, in particular, 
its past. The other tendency is apparent in the majority irrevocably 
producing increasingly primitive forms of social life and images of the 
past. This encourages the emergence of a mythologized history, alien to all 
knowledge and experience based on reliable sources such as archives.
Alexander Khryakov's article 'Historians under National Socialism: Victims, 
Sympathisers or Criminals? On the Contemporary Debate in German Historical 
Studies' is devoted to the complex and ambiguous development of modern 
German historical disciplines. The author, a lecturer at Omsk University, 
examines the heated debates which blew up in the 1990s around the Nazi past 
of historians such as Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze and Otto Brunner who 
created some of the most promising schools in post-war German 
historiography.

In her article 'Constructing Cultural Memory: 'Our Past' in Russian History 
Textbooks' Galina Zvereva (Russian State University for the Humanities, 
Moscow) examines the growth of quasi-scientific historiosophic ideas in 
teaching materials published over the last few years. Analysing numerous 
sources, Zvereva shows that, in their treatment of Russian history, 
liberally inclined authors as well as nationalistic writers tended 
unquestioningly to accept 'Russian tradition', Russia's unique path of 
civilisation' and the dichotomy between Russia and the West as basic 
premises.

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE INSTITUTIONS OF MEMORY: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW

This section examines Russian archives and libraries from a comparative 
historical perspective. Besides extracts from Peter Karstedt's classical 
monograph 'The Historical Sociology of Libraries', this section contains the 
articles 'The Birth of Public Libraries: The Politics of the Liberal 
Archive' by Patrick Joyce of Manchester University, 'Archival Action: The 
Archive as ROM and Its Political Instrumentalisa-tion under National 
Socialism' by Wolfgang Ernst from the Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin and 'Two 
Revolutions - Two Fates for Archives: On the French Revolution of 1789 and 
the Russian Revolution of 1917', by Yevgeny Starostin (Russian State 
University for the Humanities, Moscow).

SOVIET HERITAGE AND THE NEW ORDER

This section opens with Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin's article 'Russian 
Libraries and the System of Reproductive Institutions: Background and 
Prospects'. The authors, both from Moscow's Levada Centre, examine research 
information and statistics on the current state of Russian libraries. The 
educated community and society at large passively adapt to the current 
situation in the country, with deplorable consequences. Whilst intellectuals 
remain heavily dependent on the state, their attitude towards the Russian 
authorities is one of suppressed aggression.

The main thrust of Marietta Chudakova's article 'In Defence of Double 
Standards' is that it is vital for Russia, with its 75 years of totalitarian 
experience, to make widely accessible all information related to the Soviet 
period. This would naturally require the very principles of the archive and 
library systems' functioning to be revised: these systems are still largely 
run using Soviet approaches and criteria. In Russia today, the application 
of Western standards, limiting possibilities for the disclosure and 
publication of 75-year-old archive materials, will serve to protect not the 
rights of the individual, but the 'information security' of the state. This 
is tantamount to declaring a moratorium on the competent and honest study of 
twentieth-century history. Chudakova, from Moscow's Literary Institute, 
claims that without pressure and support from the public, Russian archives 
will not be made sufficiently accessible.

DIAGNOSING CRISIS

The section opens with Alia Keuten's article 'Russian Archives: On the 
Anatomy of Crisis'. Analysing Russian mechanisms of access to archive 
sources, the author, a specialist from Bremen, focuses on the conflict 
between historian, or user, and archivist. Within the current system, the 
latter is not a guide, but a kind of usurper of history. Keuten also 
examines the negative consequences of this approach to historical memory and 
its possible alternatives.

The task of a cinematographic museum is to fill lacunae' - such is the title 
of an exchange which took place between the director of Moscow's Cinema 
Museum Naum Kleiman and member of the New Literary Review editorial board 
Abram Reitblat (Moscow). Mr. Kleiman spoke about the aims pursued by his 
museum, which is simultaneously a cinema archive containing manuscripts, 
sketches, photos and other documents. He also touched on the legal 
complications which may force the museum to leave its current premises.

In her 'Note from an Insider', Marina Sorokina, of the Russian Academy of 
Sciences Archive, Moscow, explains that Russian archives are currently 
managed not by state bodies, but by their directors. Running the archives in 
accordance with the neo-conservative political market, they are frequently 
interested in the re-banning of declassified material.

In his article 'Another Reflection on a Set Topic', Nikolai Bogomolov 
addresses the problems facing researchers in Russian archives and libraries. 
A literature historian from Moscow State University, Bogomolov also examines 
the difference in attitudes towards archive work which he believes to have 
existed across generations of researchers.

In her article 'To Preserve Forever?' the director of the Russian State 
Archive for Literature and Art Tatiana Goryaeva (Moscow) analyses the 
current state of Russian archives, based on the reality of the archive she 
herself heads.

Margarita Samokhina's article 'On the Life of the Russian Libraries of 
Today: Notes of a Librarian and Sociologist' examines forms and methods of 
modernising Russian libraries to include them in the new socio-cultural 
context. The author is from Moscow.

Writing for the New Literary Review in St. Petersburg, Boris Witenberg heads 
a memoir column. In this issue, his article 'The Soul of the Archive' 
focuses on the fate of the Russian State Historical Archive. Housed in a 
historic building in the heart of Russia's former capital, the archive is 
due to be transferred to a St. Petersburg suburb - although the new premises 
have not yet been built. The present building will then be occupied by 
government authorities. The decision to move the archive aroused heated 
public debate.

THE POLICY OF OBLIVION

Vincent Duclert's article 'The French Archive Policy Crisis' examines an 
example of public influence on France's archive policy in the 1990s. The 
author, from Paris's Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 
stresses the link between the opening of the archives sensibles and the 
spread of discussion around some of the most difficult and painful moments 
in French twentieth-century history such as French people's participation in 
the deportation and murder of Jews under the Vichy government and the use of 
torture in the Algerian struggle for independence. The problem, according to 
Duclert, concerns not only 'sensitive' archives. The legal base underpinning 
all archive activity in France requires revision, and administrative reform 
is vital. Archives should be made more transparent to promote democratic 
consciousness in society.

Nikita Petrov's interview to New Literary Review editors entitled 'An 
Archive Counter-Revolution' deals with the issue of access to political 
history archives of the Soviet period. Petrov, of the International History 
and Human Rights Society 'Memorial', Moscow, recounted that the 
de-classification of documents relating to the activities of top Soviet 
governmental bodies was begun in the early 1990s. Soon afterwards, this 
process was slowed and partially halted. Many documents were briefly made 
officially available, only to regain their classified status - 
'temporarily'. Petrov ponders on public influence on archive activity, 
explains why some archivists are interested in having their documents 
classified and examines the shift in 'historical consciousness' and public 
opinion regarding the Soviet past throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Why is it, 
for instance, that the Soviet era, and Stalinism in particular, have never 
prompted widespread public debate with the participation of academics, as 
Nazi history has done in West Germany over the past few decades?

Georgy Ramazashvili (Moscow) presents his pamphlet article 
'Secrets-Shmecrets and the Battle of Kulikovo'. Ramazashvili reveals that 
the Defence Ministry Central Archive in Podolsk contains around 8 million 
archive files on the Second World War which are still classified and 
inaccessible to researchers. If the process of their de-classification 
proceeds in accordance with current legislation, it will take experts some 
80 years to go through the entire corpus and make it available to 
researchers. Meanwhile, time is running out. Before long, all possibility of 
comparing archive information with eye-witness accounts will be lost 
forever. Thus, the author believes that the management of the military 
archives and Russia's Ministry of Defence are simply not interested in a 
competent and detailed reconstruction of the events of World War Two.

In his article 'A Measured Memory', Abram Reitblat of the New Literatury 
Review magazine, Moscow, reviews two new books from Vladimir Kozlov - 
archive researcher and head of Russia's Federal Archive Service.

OTHER REALMS OF MEMORY

The section opens with a dialogue between Moscow film critic Zara Abdullaeva 
and the well-known cinema and television director Vitaly Mansky. Entitled 
'We: On Chronicle and History in Documentary Film', the debate focuses on 
images of history created in documentaries. Mansky and Abdullaeva discuss 
modern views on Soviet and Nazi documentary aesthetics, looking at Leni 
Rifenstahl's work, and talk about the transformation of events when 
identical material is used in films with different ideological aims.

Evgeny Gruzdov, of the 'Art of Omsk' city museum, and Anton Sveshnikov from 
Omsk University present their contribution entitled 'Going To the People-2: 
Working on The Dictionary of Omsk Mythology'. The article deals with areas 
of modern urban culture rarely researched by scholars: only occasionally do 
folklore experts and anthropologists delve into such matters. The 
starting-point for this piece was the authors' work on the Dictionary of 
Omsk Mythology. This semi-humorous project pins down the familiar signs of 
daily routine with stunning accuracy, drawing on the historical memory of 
townspeople as registered in the city's toponymy, legends, symbols and 
signs. All this feeds the authors' ironic reflections which fluctuate 
between academic study and 'actual' art. The appendix of course features 
selected articles from the Dictionary of Omsk Mythology.

Pavel Krylov, of Smolny College, St. Petersburg, devotes his article 
'Finding Historical Pitch: Paradigms of Unofficial Memory Research' to two 
new areas of Russian historical science: oral history and the study of 
historical memory. Rather than focussing on opposing the conservative 
academic mainstream, as is the case with Western oral history and in many 
Third World countries, the author turns instead to layers of historical 
experience ignored and suppressed by the previous regime and ideology. 
Particular attention is paid to the study of memory within ethnic minorities 
and religious groups.

Dmitry Sporov from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, 
presents his article 'Voices of Bygone Days: the Collection of Viktor 
Duvakin'. In the late 1960s, philologist Viktor Duvakin began to collect 
oral reminiscences from leading figures in the arts and sciences of the 
first half of the twentieth century. Duvakin (1909 - 1982) worked at Moscow 
State University. His experience was truly unique. An expert on the poetry 
of Vladimir Mayakovsky, he involved in his project a great many famous 
figures of his time who, due to the constraints of that era, were unable, 
and did not wish, to publish or even record their memoirs: Mikhail Bakhtin, 
Anna Akhmatova, Roman Jakobson... The author looks into Duvakin's biography, 
his choice of interlocutors and ways of working and communicating with them. 
The appendix contains a bibliography of the publications forming part of 
Duvakin's collection, which is now kept in the Scientific Library at Moscow 
University.

In his article 'The Fates of Jewish Archives in the Twentieth Century', 
Leonid Katsis, from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, 
describes the history and typology of home, or family, archives of famous 
twentieth-century scholars and artists, and ordinary people who wished to 
preserve their family history. Katsis focuses in particular on the various 
ways and methods of publishing and studying Jewish family archives.
Sophia Chuikina, from the St. Petersburg Centre for Independent Social 
Research, presents her article 'National History and Twentieth-Century 
Literature Museums in Present-Day Russia: Reworking the Soviet Experience 
and Crisis Management Strategies'. Studying the museums of St. Petersburg 
and the Volga area, Chuikina looks at the different ways of working with the 
public adopted by formerly Soviet museums. The Soviet past is dealt with in 
various ways: occasionally, it is absorbed into an area's 'local memory'; at 
other times, it is shown in the everyday habits of ordinary people; 
sometimes, it is granted epic status through unique heroes such as Chapayev, 
Gorky or Sakharov or special events such as the Leningrad blockade.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY

The section opens with an article by Elena Bobrova, Russian State University 
for the Humanities, Moscow. 'Archives via the Internet' offers a general 
analysis of existing archival information resources and detailed 
descriptions of the most interesting archive projects in the Russian 
Internet. The author concludes that archive sites are not only a convenient 
means of communication within the archive corporation, but also an effective 
tool for popularising the documentary resources of a country. They can not 
only demonstrate these riches to any user, but also help to form the right 
attitude towards archives and their functions within society.

Galina Lisitsyna (European University, St. Petersburg) submits her article 
entitled 'How an Archivist Can Be Modern'. This piece is devoted to the work 
of the Archive Training Centre at the European University in St. Petersburg, 
founded in 1999. The author stresses the special nature of the centre's 
activity, as distinct from that of historical archive institutes and state 
documentation bodies. The centre works in close collaboration with civil 
society organisations such as Memorial and Civil Control, as well as foreign 
colleagues and regional organisations.

Cultural sociologist Dmitry Ravinsky from the Russian National Library, St. 
Petersburg, writes about changing social attitudes towards libraries in the 
time of computers and the Internet. In his article 'Library Prospects', 
Ravinsky claims that changing circumstances have caused an exodus of readers 
from libraries. In these different times, the author suggests, librarians 
need to set different social objectives.

Ruth Wallach (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) has 
contributed her article 'Out Of The Box: Current Trends in American Academic 
Libraries'. This essay looks at the role of libraries in preservation and 
access to knowledge due to changes wrought on these concepts by 
technological advances. It sets up a framework for the post-modernist 
unbundling of research hierarchies within contemporary hybrid libraries and 
summarizes how technologies have affected the notion of library collections 
and their function in a born-digital age.

Sergei Soloviev of Universite Toulouse 3 and the Institut de Recherche en 
Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) is the author of the article 'The World-Wide
Library and Culture of the Ephemerides'. Volatility, loss of access and 
corruption of data in electronic form is considered in connection with the 
problem of preservation of cultural heritage and the creation and management 
of electronic archives.

The article 'Total Archiving Methods' was written by two artists, Anna and 
Mikhail Razuvaev (Moscow). This avant-garde essay classifies the methods of 
archiving used when working with the Internet - e-mail, photo archives, chat 
rooms, blogs, and so on. The article is rounded up with a humorous Utopian 
section, in which the authors predict the appearance of possibilities such 
as archiving behaviour, archiving habits and, finally, archiving all radio 
waves in a specially created new layer of the Earth's atmosphere.