The Gulag Museum of Perm, Russia and the National Park Service (NPS) have formed a unique partnership to produce a traveling exhibit, "GULAG: Soviet Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom." This website is a partnership with the NPS, the Gulag Museum, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. This online exhibit includes a section on "Stalin's Gulag," which Details the growth of the Gulag under Josef Stalin, describes the prisoners and their supposed "crimes," and depicts a typical day in the life of a Gulag prisoner.
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online provides access to digitized materials selected from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS). The digital collection consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, the HPSSS includes vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions. The HPSSS’s value is compounded by the fact that it was compiled in English and organized according to a rigorous social science framework, making it accessible to a broad range of students and scholars.
A companion site to an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Russian Avant-Garde Book: 1910-1934 affords visitors an opportunity to explore a lost world of artists and intellectuals who wanted to help change the world by making it see the sense in communism and socialism. Broken into three parts, provocatively titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, Transform the World, and Building Socialism, the exhibit awakens viewers to the passion from which it sprang. A lively interactive tour, the online exhibit shuttles visitors past more than three hundred examples of Russian avant-garde text, graphic art, and photography. Following each multi-panel tour, users are free to return to the main page of any of the three exhibits and consider at leisure the items that most grabbed their interest. Perhaps most compelling is the site's perspective of the life cycle of the Russian Avant-Garde movement itself, which only meant to help but was ultimately suppressed by a dictator who came to fear internal artistic expression as much as he did political challenge or resistance. [Internet Scout Report].
"Few nations have as colorful and vivid a history as Russia. At times torn between the East and the West, sometimes buffering the two, Russia has always been a pot of enormous ethnic diversity which refuses to melt. The result has been a mixture of socialism and capitalism, of east and west, Christianity and Islam with a bit of social experimentation thrown in. This page attempts to capture the flavor of the rich diversity evolving over Russian history and hence depends as much on the endeavors of others as those of the Russian Studies Program."
Created in 1993, REESWeb is the Virtual Library covering Russia and Eastern Europe. In its history, REESWeb has sought to help users identify high quality web content that is located in or focuses on the region stretching from Bohemia to Central Asia. All web sites listed in REESWeb are vetted by the editors, categorized for easy searching, and annotated to provide users with a good idea of what they will find upon visiting a site. This hands-on orientation places a high value on precision and quality in its listings rather than volume and, as such, should provide helpful to researchers, academics and casual users who want to find relevant material on the web rather than sifting through thousands of search results.
The Russian History Index is made of different pages which are always under construction. You will find Virtual Resources produced in Russia together with world-wide Resources if they are dealing with the history of Russia. The Russian History Index was created in April 2000.
Electronic Resources Librarian
Reference and Information Services Office, Room 107g
David and Lorraine Cheng Library
William Paterson University
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ 07470
