Mikhail Kaluzhsky: “The Virtual Gulag Museum will not only be the largest historical internet resource on this topic. Its creators want to combine research accuracy with personal memories.”
Irina Flige, director of the St. Petersburg “Memorial” Research and Information Center, said when we were arranging to meet:
– We are near Five Corners, in Dovlatov’s house.
The phrase “Dovlatov’s house” instead of a precise address is not just part of the city’s folklore. It is also a historian’s attitude toward place and time: they are personified and thus more accurately described by the name of a historical hero than by numbers and dates. “The Napoleonic Wars.” “The beautiful beginning of Alexander’s days.” “The Stolypin reforms.” “Stalin’s repressions.”
In “Dovlatov’s house,” that is, at 23 Rubinstein Street, where Sergei Dovlatov lived for almost thirty years, a presentation of the updated version of the Virtual Gulag Museum took place the day before yesterday. The St. Petersburg “Memorial” Research and Information Center, together with its partners, the software developers Alt-Soft, has been working on this project since 2004. And they will be working on it for a long time to come—memory is inexhaustible, and the number of material objects that embody history is infinite.
The Virtual Museum now features materials from 98 museums in 6 countries, but there are at least three hundred museums in total whose collections hold items, documents, and photographs related to the history of the repressions. The virtual museum already contains a huge amount of information. And although not all sections of the site are functional, it was presented to the public because the most important thing has appeared—the ability to search the entire resource and the indexes (thematic, name, geographical, sources and bibliography, and “Institutions of the GULAG and Terror”).
The project’s authors do not yet call it a museum: “This is a presentation of databases, of collections. The site will become a museum when actual museum elements appear on it—virtual halls, exhibitions, and tours.” But the most interesting part will begin when the creators of the Virtual Gulag Museum are able to combine a historical museum with a museum of memory. After all, besides museums and—a terrible word!—museum-ified objects that are read as signs of history, there is the memory that lives outside of documents and material objects. Or in objects that are not usually considered historical evidence.
For a historian, nothing can replace museums—an object becomes a source of information only when it is described and has been authenticated. The creators of the Virtual Gulag Museum would like, in the future, for any visitor to the site to be able to add to the record of an exhibit or a person, to leave new information. “Folk memory is better than scholarly memory,” says Irina Flige. “There is no memory more correct than that which grows out of the reality of life.”
A recollection may be inaccurate or even erroneous in its historical veracity. That is why the creators of the Virtual Gulag Museum want to give everyone the opportunity to tell their personal story without compromising scholarly accuracy. The balance between the precise and the personal must be maintained—professional historians will be responsible for processing and systematizing the information. Ideally, the process of a material’s journey should be transparent to any visitor: here, new information has arrived on the site; here, it has been verified; here, it has become part of an article or an exhibit description.
The site’s team will not restrict users’ right to make new entries, but the content created by the editorial team will not be editable. This “wiki-museum” envisions that any visitor can create their own virtual exhibition. Because each of us has our own interests in studying history, and we all read messages from the past differently.
“We expend colossal effort to connect an object with a message,” says Flige. “What does a small case for a comb or a broken plywood suitcase, which was kept for some reason for decades, say to us today? It is important for memory to have a material form, and how it is embodied in an object says a great deal. The objects of personal memory of executed parents or a deceased child are astonishing—there may be little evidence, but the memory is embodied in an object that becomes a relic, yet it looks nothing like what we usually consider historical evidence.
For me, the most striking example of this kind is a handful of pebbles that a Balkar girl put in her pocket in the courtyard of a prison in Nalchik before deportation. In exile in Kazakhstan, these pebbles were a memory of her homeland. When the Balkars were returned to the Caucasus, these pebbles became a memory of the exile. And sometimes, memory is embodied in people’s motivation. In the Yakut settlement of Khandyga, there is a tourist club whose members, on their hikes, collect what is left of the Kolyma camps: a coil of barbed wire, a piece of a rail… The motivation for collecting is connected to people’s idea of the past, of how it is projected onto the material world.”
However, the Virtual Museum has attempted to record history in non-material objects as well, by creating a section called “Traces of the GULAG.” Modern space is filled with signs of history, including signs of the history of state terror, even where we seem not to see them. Or we have grown accustomed to them, just as we have grown accustomed to the toponymy of most Russian cities. For several years, I worked in Novosibirsk in a building on the corner of Sovetskaya and Kommunisticheskaya streets. This combination usually amused my Moscow colleagues. As if the capital doesn’t have an Andropov Avenue.
The success of the Virtual Gulag Museum cannot be measured by the number of visitors or even by the number of museums that have joined the project. Rather, success can be judged by the number of people who will tell their personal stories on the site. The chronicler of their family, a private person motivated not by professional but by personal interest, becoming part of not only a memorial but also a research project—this is still an unknown scientific and social reality. In it, one can dream, society will be ready to describe reality through history, which is not a textbook but the sum of personal experiences of the passage of time.
And, perhaps, the main task for the professional historian will become not to unearth a previously unknown document, but to find a story where it seemingly does not exist. Such work is not only the creation of a more personified history but also a more personal relationship to the world, which also consists of names and dates, and in which the address “Dovlatov’s house” is more precise than a combination of a street name and number.
Source: “Snob”