To highlight another fantastic digital resource Peripheral Histories? editor Susan Grunewald spoke to the Blavatnik Archive, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to the preservation and dissemniation of materials contributing to the study of 20th Century World History, Jewish Culture and life in the Soviet Union, with a focus on the First and Second World Wars.
How did your archive form and how did its focus and interests develop?
In 2004, the Archive’s founder, Len Blavatnik, was presented with Judaica-themed posters and tens of albums that held a unique collection of postcards. These thousands of cards, mostly from the first half of the 20th century, depicted Jewish life in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, North America, North Africa, and the British Mandate for Palestine. Some portrayed scenes of daily life, featuring synagogues, marketplaces, schools, and other community spaces that existed in small Jewish towns and major metropolises. Others reflected more topical concerns, like holidays, contemporary personalities, or political events. Another subset focused on anti-Semitic tropes and depictions. Some of the cards had handwritten messages. Many of the images and messages were from places and people that are long gone. These postcards, despite their small size, carried a lot of information: names of publishers and artists, images and captions, handwritten messages, postal stamps. They called up historical events we didn’t know about and places we couldn’t identify. Though postcards are not traditionally considered serious objects of study, we felt that they could be valuable primary resources to researchers and educators—if we could make them easily and widely accessible and findable. Consequently, we began the long-term process of physical preservation and digitization, and pursued partnerships with scholars to catalog and interpret these multifaceted objects. To present the artifacts in an attractive and user-friendly format, we also began building our custom content-management system and a public-facing, open-access website, BlavatnikArchive.org, which we invite you to visit and explore.
Since that initial acquisition, the Archive has substantially expanded the thematic scope of its holdings, always trying to identify and share resources and subjects that might have been overlooked in existing scholarship. One topic that has become a major focus area for the Archive is the role and experience of Soviet Jewish soldiers in the Second World War. In order to add their stories to the more familiar narratives about the Jewish experience of the war and the Holocaust, we launched a long-term project to record the testimonies of veterans who had fought in the Soviet armed forces and partisan detachments. Between 2006 and 2014, we visited nearly 1,200 veterans in 78 cities across 11 countries, recorded over 1,500 hours of video testimonies, and digitized more than 11,700 artifacts, including photographs, documents, letters, and diary pages.
Our collections—which broadly fall into the categories of modern Jewish culture, Soviet history, and World Wars I & II—continue to grow and evolve. Major additions were made with the acquisitions of 52,000 World War I postcards; 22,000 National Socialist Party ephemera; 5,000 World War II postcards, letters, and leaflets; and 1,300 Siege of Leningrad postcards. There are smaller collections of Soviet illustrations, posters, and photographs. Currently the Archive’s holdings consist of more than 120,000 items.
What are the aims of the project?
Overall, our goals are to preserve materials that reflect the lived human experience of modern history; to ensure wide, open access to all primary source materials for scholars and the general public; and to present these materials in a visually appealing format that encourages deeper appreciation and engagement. Next year, we will mark our twentieth anniversary, and reflecting on our history, we can say that our goals have evolved since we began. In the early stages, our goals mimicked those of a traditional archive: to preserve materials. Then, as our aim widened to ensuring that scholars and students could easily access and use the materials we were gathering, we took advantage of the opportunities offered by the rapidly evolving technology available to digital repositories to introduce subject and geography metadata and offer full original-language transcripts with English translations.Another objective we have been focusing on is to engage the nonacademic, public audience. We’ve adopted a two-pronged approach here, offering traveling multimedia exhibits that allow the general public to see our artifacts and publishing richly illustrated digital stories incorporating a variety of objects from our collections.
How are you choosing what collections to include?
We are most interested in pursuing collections that touch on subject areas or represent medium types that are not often found at other institutions, and which supplement and enhance existing holdings. The postcard collections and the Jewish veteran testimony collections are good examples. As we become better known among scholars and the general public, some collections related to our holdings actually find us—our focus on Soviet Yiddish theater, for instance, has led two children of Yiddish theater actors to share their mothers’ personal archives with us. Another collection, which holds Soviet ephemera like stamps, sheet music, and magazines, was donated by the scholar Alison Rowley, who was interested in making these artifacts available more widely.
In addition, whenever possible, we aim to offer materials that present comprehensive frameworks for engaging with particular historical moments or topics. For example, while World War I was not a subject that fit into our main focus areas, the World War I Postcards collection, with its incredible volume of 52,000 cards, many of which include handwritten messages and reflect the highly innovative techniques of postcard production of the time, presents a unique and substantial lens for viewing that conflict. Another example of such a lens is the Kantsedikas Family Letters collection. It includes more than 650 letters exchanged between one couple during World War II: a political officer in the Red Army and his wife in the rear. Because this collection is so extensive, it reflects the microcosm of this one family’s experience in incredible detail.
Are there any particular groups or viewpoints that you look to represent?
Because our holdings are so eclectic, they naturally reflect a wide variety of perspectives within our broad focus areas of Soviet history and Jewish culture, from the deeply personal individual experience reflected by diaries and letters to top-down state messaging conveyed by Cold War and World War II propaganda materials. The cross-collection search tools that we built for researchers facilitate the discovery and analysis of these many viewpoints. For example, while “women” are not identified as a special focus for any collection, their representation and voices appear throughout our holdings, in a wide variety of contexts: from women’s experiences and attitudes towards them in the Red Army to their participation in Yiddish theater troupes.
Are there any hidden gems that surprised you that you were not expecting to find?
There are countless gems—and to each their own! As we have learned from speaking to the scholars using our archive for research and teaching, it is very difficult to predict what will engage and inspire our users (though of course we all have our own personal favorites).
Perhaps not surprisingly, our visual materials catch attention most easily. Some of us are quite taken with this postcard depicting a pickle vendor on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1900s: https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/item/9015.
In our World War II collections, we have a unique set of postcards sent by three young boys to their father at the front. These have proven to have a strong emotional appeal. Here is one example: https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/item/28873.
Personal moments in veteran interviews often describe totally unexpected situations, highlighting the fact that the human experience of a major historical event is always individual. For example, Stanislav Severinovksy, whom we recorded in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, in 2010, recalled an episode when his unit was passing through Belarus and came across a dairy factory. Though warned that the Germans were poisoning food and water upon their retreat, they couldn’t hold back from trying the delicacy that the factory held: sour cream! His retelling holds so much emotion and humor, it never fails to surprise and delight those who see the clip: https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/item/2457
Of course, because such a large part of our holdings deals with war and persecution, many of the striking artifacts reflect darker experiences. One of our collections is comprised of postcards that were published during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), a humanitarian disaster that took nearly a million lives during World War II. Their very existence seems shocking: at a time when starvation was widespread and when the city’s infrastructure was in shambles, dozens of artists produced hundreds of beautiful, vibrant postcards. Why did the state ensure their production? What messages were the postcards meant to convey? How were they produced, and by whom? How were they used? These questions led to a collaboration with multiple scholars and an NEH-funded digital humanities project that will offer an in-depth look at cultural production and propaganda during the siege. See the collection here: https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/collection/leningrad
As the result of our close collaboration with scholars, we have learned how much of a difference it makes to have an expert frame the artifacts to really make them shine. For example, one historian working with us, Brandon Schechter, has recently cataloged a collection of World War II work by the graphic designer Evgenii Kogan. One of the objects that caught his attention was the wrapper of concentrated millet porridge that was part of the Red Army rations. This very unexpected “gem” offered him a chance to explore how a disposable object might fit into the epic history of the war: https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/story/400-grams.
What is the state of digitalisation when it comes to archival materials about Ukraine and Russia? What do you think are the prospects for online accessibility of archival sources in the field?
There is obviously a huge access problem. There are holdings that were not digitized and are held in either recently closed repositories or in repositories that are dangerous to visit—obviously, a huge problem. Smaller regional repositories spread throughout Eastern Europe, which house so many invaluable personal materials and have no means to enter the contemporary technological landscape, have been inaccessible long before the latest closing of information exchange gates.
Digitization/digitalisation does not necessarily mean accessibility, though the process is certainly one of the fundamental steps. Without the application of metadata, some large-scale digitization projects continue to contain sources that are not findable/accessible—a “state” that is relevant to collections that have become physically blocked as well as those that are open around the world. Frequently, while funds are raised for the technical digitization work, the application of metadata is cumbersome. Finally, metadata shared by subject experts is especially important for the understanding of primary sources by nonscholars, and not enough funds are dedicated to the work.
Having touched on the negatives of the process, the prospects for online accessibility are great. Existing technology is available, proven, and useful. New tech, which we do not yet feel comfortable implementing, shows promise.
What are the main challenges of managing ‘The Blavatnik Archive’?
Because our collections are so varied and we work with many specialists outside the Archive on cataloging the materials, creating reasonable standardization guidelines and applying subject metadata consistently are among the greatest challenges. Another major challenge is making such a large volume of varied content user-friendly. We offer many layers of information, including transcriptions of Russian texts and translations to English. We have realized that because users do not expect such features, they do not look for them, and may not realize they are available. We are constantly working on making the navigation of the site and the collections more intuitive and manageable. We also spend a lot of time thinking about and balancing the needs and potential interests of different audiences. We dedicate extensive resources to developing tools that are specific to scholar needs. At the same time, we continue to explore how the primary sources on the Archive’s website, visually rich and engaging, can be made useful for classroom educators. Finally, we also want to be inviting to audiences who are not involved in academia but who are curious about history, culture, and heritage, and collaborate with scholars to present nonspecialist-friendly analyses and interpretations.
Does your project engage in any public outreach activities?
In addition to promoting public engagement through website storytelling, we offer nondigital programming, such as talks and exhibits that have taken place nationally and internationally at community centers, universities, galleries, and museums. For example, our traveling exhibit “Lives of the Great Patriotic War: The Untold Story of Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army during WWII” featured compelling veteran stories and rich imagery from their personal archives, along with extensive context materials on 20th-century Jewish, Soviet, and World War II history. Our exhibit “The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards” was specifically designed for the Eldridge Street Synagogue, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Exploring the American Jewish immigrant experience of the early 1900s, the exhibit featured postcards of New York City’s former Jewish neighborhood, engaging local public interest.
Most recently, we opened an exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, “The Dreyfus Affair in Postcards: Going Viral at the End of the 19th Century.” Aided by expert commentary from Maurice Samuels, author of Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (2024), the exhibit highlights the way that picture postcards, a new and immensely popular medium at the time, both documented the case and allowed Dreyfus’s supporters and opponents to share their “takes” through what could be considered an early form of social media. By connecting the historical postcards to this modern concept, we were able to make the exhibit more accessible and appealing to the contemporary audience.
Is there anything you wish more people knew about your project?
We offer open access, meaning free, downloadable records, images, and transcripts.
Many Russian-language assets, such as diaries, letters, and videos, also have English translations (the cataloging and translation work is ongoing).
Website users can create personal (and shareable) folders to save and annotate assets for research and personal projects.
We are available to schedule a webinar to present the collections and provide tutorials for using the website to faculty and classrooms.
Further Information:
You can find out more about the archive here. More information about the collections can be accessed here and searched here. To browse the veteran profiles use this link.
