I have always had a keen interest in the history of the Soviet Union. My recent experience teaching politics to first year university students has taught me how is difficult to convey to anyone with little or no memory of the world pre-1990 the shadow cast by the Soviet presence. Now, there happened to have been the odd communist in my family, so I guess that the household I grew up in the shadow was felt in a little more sympathetic way than some. But despite the ready access to numerous books, pamphlets and propaganda pieces, the whole notion of the Soviet Union (or Eastern Europe more generally) was an utter mystery to me.
So of course, given my interest in history, the former-USSR still maintains a presence. Yet, unlike much modern history, the history of the Soviet Union has a beginning, middle and an end. Amplifying this, its end does not seem that long ago, even if we are nearing twenty years! To anyone with an eye for history, even its beginning was relatively recent.
What else is clear is that, whatever perspective you bring to the subject, the experiment that was the Soviet Union delivered dramatic examples of both collective endeavour and civic destruction. The website Seventeen Moments in Soviet History offers a comprehensive look at this monumental period of modern history. Funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, the project has collected a wide range of material and developed a website devoted to the application of new technologies in the humanities and social sciences, combining both a scholarly eye for detail, with a good nose for what might actually interest the less scholastic visitor.
I think that the people behind this site manage the balance between well. In some way, it reminds me of a very interesting museum that I dragged Jen into when we visited a few years ago while we were in Berlin: The Story of Berlin. Not being quite as keen as I on the whole history 'thing', I think that Jen enjoyed the varied and novel ways that The Story of Berlin managed to tell what is a fascinating story (well, I know that I did!). I think that the same applies to this site. Rather than attempt to answer categorically whether the Soviet legacy can be best characterised by its achievements or its crimes, it endeavours to help people understand the complexities of the Soviet experience, one that throughout its history offered an often uncomfortable duality of great good and great evil. For its designers, the object of the website is to give users a sense of what the experience of the time and place might have been like, utilising the words and voices of its participants and its observers.
The model that they have employed is a novel one. The website selects seventeen moments from Soviet history to act as a starting point, some that are self-evidently historically important (the October revolution; Khrushchev's secret speech; the repression of the Prague Spring) some less obviously so (the evolution of the Soviet champagne industry; the end of rationing; the peaks and troughs of the Soviet film industry). From this starting point, a drop down presents other events great and insignificant that took place in the same period as the 'key' focus. For each there is be a short essay introducing the subject, and a selection of newsreel clips, songs and audio clips, images and translated texts to give a sense of how contemporaries understood the events.
To be honest, I love history like this, and would encourage anyone even remotely interested to check it out. I'd like to think that this sort of experiment can (and already has) be applied to a whole manner of topics.
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