It was one of the most enduring social experiments of the Communist era: since the revolution of 1917, Russian families from various backgrounds have lived together in urban communal apartments. Colgate professors Alice Nakhimovsky and Nancy Ries, with colleagues from around the world, have created an online museum to systematically document this unique lifestyle through pictures, video clips, articles, and artifacts.
"Communal Living in Russia" sprang from images and ethnography posted to the Internet by Ilya Utekhin, an anthropologist at the European University in St. Petersburg. With a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Utekhin, Ries, Nakhimovsky, and Cornell's Slava Paperno spent two years building an enhanced site that features:
- almost three hours of original video shot by Utekhin with Slawomir Grunberg of Log In Productions
- 364 photographs
- 46 original essays
- 12 audio recordings of interviews with annotated, bilingual transcriptions
- 22 translated documents with bilingual annotations
- excerpts from feature films, fiction, autobiographies, articles, and essays that depict communal apartment life
Nakhimovsky, with her background in Russian language and culture, prepared translations while Paperno, who hails from Russia, used his computer expertise to build the storefront and an extensive backend infrastructure. "We collaborated -- not just on every word, but on every period and comma," says Ries, who wrote many of the essays.
The impact of the project has been profound. Peeking into kitchens and living rooms, it has opened a window on historically relevant, intrinsically moving first-person narratives by everyday Russians who lived through landmark moments of the 20th century.
"We strived to capture something of a disappearing way of life thus creating a durable record of a social era and institution that is vanishing," the team wrote in its final NEH report.
This year, students and scholars in America, Europe, and Russia are using the site to satisfy coursework and curiosity. You can, too, at http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/.