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Collection Principals
The Soviet Archives Exhibit is administered by the Library of Congress. This exhibit, which was also shown in Moscow shows documents that were formally considered government secrets. The goal of the exhibition is to illustrate the Soviet Unions foreign and domestic policies, as well as Soviet-American relations. The exhibition was co-created by the Library of Congress and the Russian Archival Committee. They note in the preface that "the documents that the Library of Congress has here chosen from the 500 made available from the Russian archives cover the entire range of Soviet history from the October Revolution of 1917 to the failed coup of August 1991. They include material from archives that had been key working files of the Communist rulers until August 1991: the archives of the Central Committee, the Presidential archive, and the KGB."
Object Characteristics
The online exhibit follows the "path" of the physical exhibit, going so far as to explain that the two sections of the exhibit are physically separated by floors. Part of taking the online tour involves clicking golden footprint arrows. The quality of the scanned images is not terribly good. There is no option to zoom past "actual size," which makes clarity a problem. There are excellent introductions written for each document exhibited, however they chose only one object to represent each section - with a collection of 500 this seems to be a shame.
Metadata
No metadata is given about the location, call number etc. of the exhibited documents. They do, however, have translations.
Intended Visitors
This exhibit seems oriented towards scholars, rather than the casual observer. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I had almost finished looking at the site that I realized that this site is from 1992, this explains many of the more disappointing aspects of the site - it is extremely unattractive.
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