The project for the study of dissidence and samizdat: an interview with Ann Komaromi

Abstract

In fall 2015, Professor Ann Komaromi, one of Canada's leading scholars of Soviet unofficial culture and publishing, launched a new website titled Project for the Study of Dissidence and (http://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/). The project received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and other funding agencies, involved extensive collaboration with colleagues and organizations in several countries, and is governed by a peer-review process including an international editorial board of recognized specialists. Because it is important to find ways to engage with the digital humanities within traditional forums for scholarly discourse, the following interview aims to present this project and to highlight its significance and value for both the scholarly and the broader communities of interest.Allan Reid (AR): Ann, in November of 2015 you launched the Project for the Study of Dissidence and (PSDS). It consists of various components, including some that have existed for several years. Your project is conceived on a grand scale, but in a way which clearly allows for a staged development and for usability by scholars and students at all stages along the way. Could you walk me through the key steps in the journey which took you from more traditional forms of scholarship, such as journal and book publishing, where you have a well-established record, into this form of disseminating knowledge and information, as well as its archival (database) function.Ann Komaromi (AK): Samizdat was a topic that lent itself to thinking about alternative forms of publishing and doing networked projects. The people at the Memorial Society in Moscow had already produced a catalogue of samizdat for their website as part of their own History of Dissidence project, but they drew on a limited set of data, including what had been published by Radio Liberty in its samizdat documents series. The Open Society Archive, which houses the Radio Liberty samizdat archives, was interested in doing something much bigger, and we initially talked about partnering. It became clear over time, however, that thoroughly cataloguing even a small set such as the Soviet periodicals was a huge task, and that expanding it immediately was not possible.It seemed to me that there was great merit in making the information accessible in electronic format to the scholarly community and getting feedback. This was begun with the Database of Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, which I launched back in 2011. The next stage was to try to make rare editions themselves more available, and to attempt to create an engaging interface for more general users through timelines and interviews with dissidents, as I did for PSDS in 2015. Fortunately, there was grant support for this kind of dissemination, from SSHRC and other organizations, and interest from the University of Toronto Libraries. However, I always knew that analytical articles in established peer-reviewed journals and monograph book publications had to be done as well - the one did not replace the other.AR: You have partnered and collaborated with several key institutions and individuals, some of which, as you point out, maintain their own electronic websites and databases. Could you tell me a bit more about how PSDS differs from some of these, for example, the sites maintained by Memorial in Russia (http://www.memo. ru), or Rights in Russia (http://www.rightsinrussia.info/home) (http://www.hro.org), or the International Samizdat Research Association (http://www.samizdatportal.org/)?AK: Rights in Russia is an important site for news and views pertaining to rights in the Russian Federation today. Memorial in Russia, particularly the History of Dissidence project there, as well as the International Samizdat [Research] Association (IS[R] A), housed at the Open Society Archive in Budapest, have an historical focus, and that was the basis of our work together. …