Seventeen Moments in Soviet History

Document Type

Media

Abstract

From the website: "SEVENTEEN MOMENTS IN SOVIET HISTORY is a multi-media archive of primary materials designed to introduce students and the general public to the richness and contradictions of Soviet history. It provides a cross-section of Soviet life in seventeen different years, following the title of a beloved television spy serial from the seventies. Each module covers politics, society, culture and economics, so that users might experience a given time through the words, sounds and sights that a common Soviet citizen would have encountered. We hope the materials presented here help students understand the more complicated truth about Soviet history — that at all times life in the Soviet Union offered experiences of great good and great evil. Soviet citizens lived their lives and made their country’s history in circumstances of incredible peril as well as promise. The objective of this web site is to give users a sense of what this total experience was like, using the original words of the participants.

THE ARCHIVE MAY BE ACCESSED BY YEAR OR BY THEME. Subject essays written by a contributing scholar provide brief introductions to over 200 subjects. These essays are supported by more than 1400 images, 270 video clips, music with translated lyrics, and over 600 primary texts, as well as links to relevant materials outside the website. The Glossary tab features a list of historical terms and abbreviations, and the Personages tab provides dates, photos and basic biographical information for over 600 people in Soviet history.

SEVENTEEN MOMENTS IN SOVIET HISTORY WAS CREATED by James von Geldern (Macalester College) and Lewis Siegelbaum (Michigan State University) with generous funding from an educational development grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 1999 to 2002. In 2014, Amy Nelson (Virginia Tech) joined the team as content curator and web director. The original site was developed in collaboration with MATRIX, the center for digital humanities and social sciences at Michigan State University. MATRIX supports and hosts the current version of the site as well.

Over its long history, the site has benefited from the expertise and support of many people: Krzystof Karski designed the original site; at MATRIX, Dean Rehberger and Bartek Plichta offered valuable advice for the organization of the tangle of Soviet history into a coherent and useable web site; Emilia Simeonova of Macalester College, together with Ward McKee and Meredith Roman of Michigan State University undertook important work in developing materials for the original site; in 2008 Christian Meister oversaw the first redesign of the site, which was supported by a research grant from Macalester College and private donations; since 2007, Kristin Edwards (Notre Dame de Namur University) has collected materials for the site from the Hoover Archives and Stanford Libraries. She also coordinated the site upgrade in 2008. Jackie Hawthorne (MATRIX) served as project supervisor for the site re-design in 2015."

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