Ugh, I’ve got a lot of transfers ahead of me… 
Hopefully, we’ll keep moving forward and invent or discover improved storage solutions. Speaking of discoveries, here’s one still making news today:
As a historian, let me “me three” here… Paper archives are going to survive much longer than these digital archives, unless steps are taken to preserve them.
Paper? How about paper? 
Yes, let’s print out everything that was created digitally to give the next generations something to digitise.
We leaned away from that because of fire and flood damage risks. Having multiple digital backup copies spread out minimizes that. Still, I agree that preservation of the originals is best.
Yes. If it’s something like your family history that you’ve worked hard to discover and preserve - print it onto high quality archival paper with archival ink.
It’ll be a family treasure. You can print several copies. You can put copies of other media in it. Maybe those M discs.
Indeed… of course, keeping digital copies means ensuring that later generations keep moving as formats change. This is probably easier to ensure in an institutional setting, which makes unofficial archives at greater risk for being lost over the long term.
Yeah… I guess, overall, these sorts of archives are always a risk for being lost, given how they depend on later generations to keep them going, when they might not have an interest in that…
Democratizing archives is hard, y’all!
Good thing I have a salt mine at hand.
Gold plates it is!
If you need some books about the daily life in the Soviet Union with a positive bent…
Don’t know anything about the author of the video, but the introduction set off a lot of alarms:
Visitors’ accounts have to be treated very carefully. The USSR was very concerned about presenting a perfect propaganda facade to the outside world, and that involved carefully managing foreign visitors’ impressions. Only those sufficiently sympathetic would be allowed entry in the first place, and then they would stay under constant watch by the security services as they got a flattering guided tour of the country. The “reality of experience” they reflect is highly privileged and very unrepresentative, if not outright fake.
It’s particularly alarming to single out the 1930s - a period of the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the National Operations and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The infamous case of Walter Duranty dates back to it - a journalist who sold official Kremlin propaganda as his own reporting to The New York Times while living lavishly in Moscow, and somehow won a Pulitzer for it. Meanwhile, Gareth Jones had to take personal risks to shake off his chekist handlers and see the famine-ravaged countryside with his own eyes.
I mean, you can also find positive accounts from the 1930s about life in Germany. Some of them may even be valuable historical sources when read in an appropriate context, but curating a reading list that singles out only those positive accounts would be very, very bad.
On the topic of carefully watched westerners in Eastern Bloc countries, here’s an interesting article. It’s a review of a book by an anthropologist who worked in communist Romania, and after the fall of Ceaușescu got to read her personal file compiled by the secret police, where she learned that basically everyone she had interacted with had been an informant, including close friends and romantic partners. The reviewer also had similar experiences in Poland, and brings up other cases from East Germany and elsewhere for comparison. (Archive link in case of paywall.)
Sigh…
It’s interesting to see how much the Soviet Union courted wealthy American business tourists.
I have a bound volume of The Illustrated London News from 1936.This was a weekly news magazine aimed at the upper middle class, not exactly a hotbed of Soviet supporters, but it contains ads for tours of the Soviet Union, which at the time was in the throes of the Great Purge, Stalin’s reign of terror.
Also, how much you get there were tons of tourism advertising for destinations in the American south during the same time, which was the era of Jim Crow… or advertising with regards to traveling out west too, on land that had not too recently been Native American lands? I’m curious if there are studies about the land set aside out west by various presidents that became our national parks system and how that was made possible by the Native American genocide? Generally speaking, the national parks are understood as a positive good, ignoring WHO was on those lands previously and HOW they were made “pristine” for white tourists.
Which also reminds me of…
Over all, I appreciate that Lady Izdihar is going against the grain of much of the English language historiography about the Soviet union, which does ignore the voices that are not uniformly negative about the Soviet Union. I don’t think it undermines the work on the Holdomor or the Purges to do so, just like focusing on the positives of the 20s and 30s in the US doesn’t undermine scholarship on Jim Crow… the reality is that modernism as a lived experience (whether in the US or the Soviet Union) was complicated and we should try and understand multiple perspectives on a particular period of time, in order to fully understand it.
Modernity was/is contradictory and confusing, wherever it’s found. It’s often oppressive, as it has a very narrow parameters for how people could exist, and that was true everywhere. But it was often experienced as liberatory , too, in the sense that it completely upended previously existing social relations and allowed people to forge new ones (to a degree, as long as it fit within the narrow band or acceptable). I don’t think it’s illegitimate to explore the very different reactions different people had to the new social relations, whether it was in the US or in the Soviet Union. If we wish to take bottom up history seriously, that is what our goal should be in the first place…
[ETA]
I completely agree with this. It should be the job of qualified historians to synthesize knowledge from various perspectives, to critically engage with sources and evaluate their merits. Taking those western visitor accounts for example, I could see some interesting study approaches using them as sources. One may compare different accounts with each other, noting the commonalities and differences, and mapping out the negative spaces - what areas of Soviet life they never saw or never talked about. Or one may contrast a foreigner’s account to a contemporary diaries of Soviet citizens, or to the contents of the foreigner’s file in the KGB archives. One may place the narrative of travel accounts within the context of Soviet policy of tourism and foreign relations. Etc, etc.
But when somebody cherry-picks their sources based on tone, and puts the burden of figuring out the other side(s) of the story onto lay audience, that’s no longer impartial historical research. Particularly when that target tone happens to align with the narrative of the powerful (official Soviet state propaganda) while marginalizing the voices and experiences of the repressed. For that we have other words: bias, whitewashing, propaganda.
That probably had less to do with propaganda and more with the practical goal of attracting their business. In the early days, USSR severely lacked knowledge in industry, so the wave of industrialization in the 1930s had to be driven largely by the hired expertise of foreign engineers.
Which, as far as I know, she is.
To some degree, all historians do this, including all the most well known, mainstream of Cold War historians employed by top universities who tended to employ sources that confirmed their biases about the Soviet Union, many times while claiming objectivity. I’ve watched quite a few of her videos and have never seen her deny shit or hide her biases. I don’t always agree with her, but I do appreciate that she’s not pretending to be unbiased and in fact she’s putting her biases out there instead. I do believe she’s right about how much of the historiography has been biased the other way and has ignored or dismissed positive accounts as merely “propaganda” rather than someone’s actual experiences. That of course does not mean that the SU was all rainbows, etc, but taking all views seriously isn’t a bad thing. People’s experiences are people’s experiences…
Besides that, historians have been reorienting their understanding of the second world for years now, which is, I think, a good thing. The cold war itself distorted our understanding of topics such as every day life that we do not have a well informed understanding of how most people experienced the soviet union living on a day to day basis, instead we have a generally very propagandized version borne out of blind anti-communism.
