Comments for Russian History Blog

Comment on Forgive me, Natasha and Sergei! by Randall

Randall — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:27:20 +0000

…I apologize for my poor memory….but it must have been in the early seventies…I think I was around 11 to 13 years old….so that would put it between 1970 to 1972……

Comment on Forgive me, Natasha and Sergei! by Randall

Randall — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:48:58 +0000

This has been very interesting reading for me…the article and the comments….thank you Caroline for your passion in pursuing this story and for taking the time to make comments on it. I read “the Persecutor”…but that was after I met Sergei Kourdakov….as a teen, i went to an Underground Evangelism conference at Winona Lake Indiana in the mid 1970′s….after Sergei spoke, if my memory is correct, he stood up front all alone…..I mustered the courage to walk up and shake his hand….he grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously (he was very strong)….he had a huge smile on his face and kept saying “praise the Lord, hallelujah”………whatever the truth is about the book, that meeting subtly changed the way I understood my life, this world and the Gospel…..and I hope with all my heart to shake Sergei’s hand again…

Comment on The Woman with the Five Elephants by Melody

Melody — Sun, 12 May 2013 03:17:37 +0000

I’ve watched the documentary three times and each time I pick up something that I missed previously. I found Svetlana enchanting and mesmerizing. I wish someone would write a biography of her as I would definitely read it.

Comment on Gulag Boss – Administration and Complicity by Deborah Kaple

Deborah Kaple — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:27:05 +0000

Hi Ansels,

I haven’t seen any other memoirs come out from guards or commanders. There may be some in Russian that I have not seen yet. You might look at Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag: A History to see if there is anything in her list of sources. Keep us posted on the script!

Best,
Deborah

Comment on Gulag Boss – Administration and Complicity by Ansels

Ansels — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:45:04 +0000

I am currently working on a feature script about GULAG and this kind of information is invaluable for me! Can I ask you if there is available any other literature at all similar to Mochulskys memoirs? (Meaning – from a perspective of a guard/commander.)

Thank you!

Comment on Forgive me, Natasha and Sergei! by Astichete.Lamula.pe

Astichete.Lamula.pe — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:25:01 +0000

This small agricultural city has a long history of growing strawberries,
except for the interruption during the World War II.
Next up is for those who are planning on a more simple party
for their New Year’s Eve celebration. The oldest petroglyph is believed to be about 2,000 years old.

Comment on Open Access – Change Is Inevitable by Steve Barnes

Steve Barnes — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 09:19:25 +0000

I had assumed you were an open-access supporter, John. I was merely pointing to what I have read from the OA community about the author-pays model. At the moment, I find myself particularly intrigued by the Press Forward model developed at our RRCHNM. You can watch and listen to a lecture on that model here. Of course, I have some questions about whether and how something along this line can work in a field like ours with a much smaller presence on the open access web than one finds with digital humanities scholars. It has me thinking about directions we might go to enhance Russian History Blog's impact on providing a model for open access in our field, but I am still working on that.

Comment on Forgive me, Natasha and Sergei! by Harry Gibson

Harry Gibson — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 17:16:16 +0000

Cathy I’m inclined to agree with your view. I think it naive to believe that a journalist could get “the truth” from interviews in Russia except from personal friends. No country has suffered so much persecution of the general population let alone non-Russian Orthodox Christians as Russia. I would refer doubters to “The Church in the Bear’s Garden”. I think the details of “Forgive Me Natasha” are not of great importance suffice to say that even today non-Russian Orthodox Christians are having their adopted children taken away by the “authorities” – and Caroline thinks she will get the “truth” in Russia? – dream on!

Comment on Open Access – Change Is Inevitable by John Randolph

John Randolph — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:20:41 +0000

Thanks, Steve. I should say that despite appearances, I’m not actually an open access skeptic, so much, as a person who’s wanting to track how it’s actually evolving in practice. I imagine if I edited my posts above into one presentation, it’d look a little less manic and implicitly hostile, but I was just keeping a journal here. I’m still quite curious as to the statistics of how all this is actually being supported — in addition to position pieces, which of course are also interesting, but seem to be a little more readily accessible. It’ll be interesting to see if, over the objections of some OA supporters, austerity governments and for profit publishers succeed in making the author-pays model standard. It seems an open struggle, at the moment, to be sure: though I haven’t gotten statistics, the DOAJ list certainly seemed to have a very large number of very active for profit author pays OA publishers; and in that sense I was interested to see an invitation from one show up in my e-mail box!

Comment on Open Access – Change Is Inevitable by Steve Barnes

Steve Barnes — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:54:32 +0000

John, I believe the open-access supporters are in general opposed to the author-pays model and the suggestions of the Finch Report. (Here is the AHA response to the Finch Report and Dan Cohen's response to the AHA response--both of which make for interesting reading.) One of the chief problems they have identified is that this merely replaces one type of inequality of access with another. With the subscriber-pays model, users without financial means to afford access are denied the opportunity to read scholarship. With the author-pays model, authors without financial means of their own or institutional financial support are denied the opportunity to publish. I think they are largely correct that this is merely a replacement of one set of problems by another. The question, then, is what is to be done? I don't have a perfect answer, and I don't think the OA supporters have one yet either, but they are actively doing something to try to make a positive difference. I've been having off-line discussions with some of our colleagues about what options we might see forward in terms of OA in our field. Hopefully, I will be in a position to share some of those thoughts here on the blog and in a planned exchange in Newsnet in the near future. Steve