The project in 1917 has. We are also grateful
You won't find fiction here. All texts of the heroes of the project “1917. free history are taken from their letters, memoirs and diaries. We use only documentary photos and videos.
By visiting the site, every day you will learn about what happened exactly a hundred years ago, what occupied people on that day, how the country lived. We revived the past by packing all the materials into the usual form of a modern social network. And they messed around a bit in the section.
"1917. Free History" is the first project of the creative studio "History of the Future".
We create websites mobile applications, animated films and coming up with new ways to tell stories. Innovative storytelling is our profession. We believe that knowing the past is necessary to change the future for the better.
How it works?
Our the main objective- to make the story popular, to show the polyphony of historical characters to the widest possible audience. Therefore, we cannot work according to all the rules of academic science and do not comply with some norms that seem unshakable to serious scientists:
- We shorten texts to make them more readable. But we never change the words or the meaning of what is written.
- There is a link next to each entry that will help the user find the original source.
- All dates in our project are in the new style. Today you are reading about what happened exactly 100 years ago.
Project team:
Karen Shahinyan - co-founder and CEO project
Olga Avstreikh - product director
Alexey Ivanovsky - art director
Daria Ivanova - executive producer
Rachel Zemlinsky - photo director
Natalia Vasilyeva - photo editor
Andrey Borzenko - editor-in-chief
Mikhail Degtyarev - screenwriter, story editor
Yuri Saprykin Jr. - editor of special projects and director of SMM
Vera Makarenko - editor English version
Victoria Malyutina-Lukashina - producer archival works
Galina Papernaya, Andrey Shirinsky - news and press editors
Anna Kuznetsova – producer of the English version and infographics
Daulet Zhanaydarov, Pavel Krasovitsky – researchers
Serafim Orekhanov - senior editor
Irina Ivanova – financial director
Alena Tokareva - designer
Vladimir Belokon - Designer of the special project "Revolution. Live"
Nikita Treptsov - designer of the games "Coup" and "Defense of the Winter"
Alexey Alekseev - economic editor
Natalia Shainyan - editor of cultural events
Anna Bocharova - video producer
Julia Zakrevskaya - video editor
Natalia Molchanova - proofreader
Vladimir Ozhereliev - lawyer
Ivan Sidorov – ITSumma, CTO
Sergey Sporyshev – ITSumma, CTO
Evgeny Finkelstein – ITSumma, lead developer
Alexey Shabalin – ITSumma, lead developer
Evgeny Yelesin – ITSumma, lead developer
Alexander Bortnik – ITSumma, developer
Andrey Shamakhov – ITSumma, mobile developer
Sergey Lutov – ITSumma, front-end developer
JSKT data group - infographic "Guide to the Romanovs"
Mikhail Terentiev – Mailfit, email marketing
For work on the infographic “Dangerous Liaisons. Map royal dynasties Europe” we are very grateful to Dmitry Lozhkin (design), Pavel Bludov and Andrey Alexandrov (programming and development), Natalya Kondrashova and Evgeny Vladimirovich Pchelov (collection and verification of information).
Scientific consultants:
Kirill Solovyov, Doctor of History, Leading Researcher Institute Russian history RAS, author of works on political history Russia late XIX- the beginning of the XX century.
Roman Timenchik, professor at Jerusalem University, historian of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century
Nikolay Bogomolov, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of Moscow State University, Head. Department of Literary and Artistic Criticism, specialist in Russian literature of the XX century
Georgy Orekhanov, Doctor of History, Professor of PSTGU, specialist in the history of the Russian Church at turn of XIX-XX centuries
Alexandra Selivanova, architectural historian, curator of the Center for the avant-garde on Shabolovka
"1917. Free History” was published by Yandex as part of a program aimed at developing cultural and educational initiatives in the fields of history, literature, art and philosophy.
We are proud to be the first such project.
They write about us:
The New York Times - ‘Revolution? What Revolution?’ Russia Asks 100 Years Later
CNN - Russia's 1917 revolution gets a social media makeover | Russian Revolution: An awkward moment for Putin 100 years on | The revolution Putin wants to ignore
Russian Revolution given social network treatment | BBC Project 1917: Humanizing the Russian revolution
The Guardian - Tragedy or triumph? Russians agonize over how to mark 1917 revolutions
The Economist - A Russian social-media site is reliving 1917
The Spectator UK - Why Putin's Russia will be keeping quiet about 1917
Lonely Planet - You can now relive Russian history in real time on this social media feed
The Spectator Australia
Zpravy iDNES.cz - Rusové vzkřísili hlasy cara a Lenina, zánik impéria mapují den po dni
Expansion Mexico - Opinion: la revolución que Putin quiere ignorar
The project was made by:
Ekaterina Bazanova, Ekaterina Abramova, Pavel Krasovitsky, Ilya Starkov, Ksenia Akselrod, Yulia Yuzefovich, Maria Shubina, Petr Kotrelev, Alena Vershinina, Uliana Malashenko, Daria Gabelko, Andrey Shashkov, Eduard Epstein, Olga Derkach, Vladislav Bykov, Daria Sukharchuk, Maria Noel , Kamil Galeev, Vera Raskina, Nikolai Misko, Alesya Chernyavskaya, Sergey Sdobnov, Stanislav Kuvaldin, Maria Konstantinidi, Anna Rezvykh, Alexandra Sivtsova, Alexander Kolyandr, Maxim Konyaev, Maria Zakhodyaichenko, Natalia Beskhlebnaya, Maria Krivosheina, Irina Shestopalova, Svetlana Yatsyk, Tina Kataeva, Ilya Ovchinnikov, Tasha Lizorkina, Valeria Pliskina, Natalya Kudryavtseva, Alexander Sankov, Nikolai Borisov, Yegor Maximov, Alexei Izosimov, Elizaveta Knyazeva, Daria Strakhova, Irina Rubanova, Ella Rossman, Maria Smirnova, Sergei Popov, Arseny Popov, Olga Slivko, Tatyana Kullanda, Irina Frantzuzhan, Natalya Tenzer, Victoria Gendlina, Vladimir Maksakov, Daulet Zhanaydarov, Polina Peremitina, Nika Krainova, Nina Vinogradova, Daria Pasichnik, Maxim Dyakonsky, Arina Khokhlova, Vanya Oskolkov
We are also grateful:
Composer Pavel Karmanov for project music
About the revolution of 1917. Why did you decide to make an online project as well?
A book is fine, but just writing a book would make me rather bored. This is an archaic genre. Why limit your own options? During the years that I worked at Dozhd, I got used to doing journalism and still think that I do it. It’s just that I don’t work with today’s news, because they are not at all interesting, but I reconstruct in detail a reality that does not exist now, but using all modern instruments and technologies. This project does not interfere with the book, but complements it. I liked the way All the Kremlin's Army spread, and I wanted to expand my audience to include people who today just won't sit down to read a book.
Our main platform is a website, it looks like a social network and works according to the same mechanisms. Inside our team, we say about this site: "The best social network in history: all members died long ago." We maintain accounts for those who are not now, but these are not fictitious entries, we do not compose anything from ourselves, but publish their diaries and letters, which coincide with the date of publication. At first we decided that it would be a hundred characters, but now there are more than a thousand. Thus, every day we talk about what happened exactly a hundred years ago - who did what, what they thought, what they hoped for, what they were afraid of.
I came up with the project a year ago and gradually got a team - now we have 15 people on the staff and more than 50 freelancers and volunteers.
Who came to whom: Yuri Saprykin and Sima Orekhanov, who make public "Emperor's Face", to you, or you to them?
We met Sima when I was still working on the Dozhd TV channel - he interviewed me for The Question about the book "All the Kremlin's Army", I said that I was going to do a historical project, and he replied that he also wanted to participate in it , and then introduced me to Yura. Then many wonderful people from everywhere joined us - Dasha Ivanova, who worked in the magazine " Big city”, Andrei Borzenko from Kommersant, Victoria Malyutina-Lukashina, former editor department "Society" "Gazety.Ru".
Do the diaries and letters of people who lived in 1917 coincide with how they write and talk about the events of that time now - for example, in history lessons?
Fortunately, it so happened that the state does not have any official position on this topic - there is no template, standard view. In general, it is ambiguous: for no one there are either their own, or strangers, neither bad nor good. After the Soviet era, the revolution lost its sacredness. All this gives us freedom.
As you say, there is no template view, but over time, specific images of the leaders of the revolution began to form. Take the saying that the Tsar is a saint, and Lenin is on a par with Hitler. The archives of the Cheka-NKVD-KGB from 1917 to 1991 will be classified for a long time - where there are secrets, there is an opportunity to create myths about historical events. What do you think, this opinion is lowered from above? The same Poklonskaya probably did not give all this offhand ...
I think it's impromptu. I am completely unfamiliar with Poklonskaya, but I have no reason to believe that someone suggested to her - the collective mind is not capable of coming up with such a thing. Documents that were published after the collapse Soviet Union, of course, do not give complete information, but for us it's downright expanse. Our ability to learn about what happened in 1917-1918 is close to absolute - you just need to want to. The only problem is that no one wants it - it's an unfashionable, unpopular topic, and, fortunately, there is little speculation on it.
During the time that has passed since the collapse of the USSR, Lenin in last time was a character of interest to the public when Kuryokhin called him a mushroom. After that, interest disappeared - no one is interested in it. Here is Stalin - yes, always alive, he is practically actor Nowadays. 1917 is the most important year in Russian history, it is the absolute pinnacle of both Russian culture and civil society, and at the same time it is the beginning of the worst nightmare for the country. But this year is of no interest to anyone. Canonization royal family- an incident that, for a part of society, places some accents in the perception of the events of a hundred years ago. But in general, this did not really affect our history - I did not notice the mass veneration of Nicholas II by the Russians.
C What conclusion should the audience of the 1917 Project draw? Does it challenge the values that the state is trying to offer? For me, the source of these values is in the pre-revolutionary era: we are brought up on noble literature, and there is no focus on equality and freedoms in it ...
The last thing I want is to sell the audience some conclusions. This would make the project meaningless for me and for the audience. When you push something, it is immediately visible, and it is impossible to disguise it. Our idea is the opposite. Reality is not black and white, it is very multidimensional, and this project shows that history is not a story about leaders, as is usually written in our textbooks: first Nicholas II ruled the country, then the Provisional Government headed by Kerensky, and then came to power Lenin. The 1917 Project is not about the state and even, I would say, not about society - it is such a puzzle, each fragment of which allows readers to experience the situation of those years in real time.
The difference from us of those people whose memories we took is that they did not know how the story ended. They had a completely different attitude to their "today", they had no clear plans, they did not know any other Russia. Now these characters give us the opportunity to look at those events in a less schematic way. Our project is not a challenge to values - it makes you feel the atmosphere of that time.
Why, after all, Lenin today emerges more and more as a “bad” character, and Stalin as a “good” one?
Speaking schematically, Lenin is the man who destroyed the empire, and Stalin created the empire. From the point of view of the people for whom the empire, national pride and superpower are important values, such a perception of these persons is quite understandable. Revolution from the point of view of these people is bad. But this is not a general point of view, this bright group our population, in my opinion, is not the majority.
C Who are the investors of your project?
These are Yandex, Sberbank and the Dmitry Zimin Foundation. Well, myself.
C Is the project non-commercial? Or will he recoup the money invested?
Absolutely non-commercial. He is educational. We all love the word edutainment - entertaining education. We all want as much as possible more people connected and followed us.
S So for those who supported you, it was an absolutely philanthropic gesture, and not an investment?
I think they did it solely out of a desire to enlighten. Certainly no one was going to make money this way. However, let them tell about it themselves.
Another important partner of ours is VKontakte, which will become the second platform for our project. Some of our heroes will have accounts on
The year of the centenary of the revolution has come to an end. We have selected seven online projects where the authors try to show the events of 1917, and not just talk about them. An occasion for adults to look at textbook facts in a new way. It will also be interesting for children to feel that a hundred years ago is very close.
1917. Free History
Yandex's non-standard project is an attempt to transfer the events of 1917 online: as if all this is happening right now, somewhere in parallel with us. A huge amount of historical data and materials of that time - memoirs, diaries, newspaper publications, letters - are presented in a modern format of a social network feed, video news releases and even cartoons. Here Lenin writes allegedly in his status on November 7, 1917: "The Provisional Government has been overthrown." Former Emperor Nicholas II celebrates excellent weather in Tobolsk on this day and says that he sawed firewood. Ivan Bunin travels from Yelets to Moscow in a wagon with soldiers. Trotsky checks in the next day in Petrograd at Smolny.
Leonid Parfyonov reads in " live Lenin's speech. In a word, if you missed it, be sure to look: you definitely haven’t seen anything like this yet.
Project “1917. Free history" - partner of the exhibition "Someone 1917" in Tretyakov Gallery on the Crimean shaft. If you want to dive even deeper into that time, take part in joint competition Tretyakov Gallery and Project 1917. To do this, you need to choose one of the paintings presented at the exhibition, get used to the image of the person depicted on it, make a cosplay (photo parody) and publish it on your page on a social network with the tag #someone1917. Details can be found in the social networks of the Tretyakov Gallery.
Yandex Publishing
A compact but capacious course of seven 20-minute audio lectures with a selection of reading materials on the topic. You will remember why Nicholas II was left on the eve of the revolution without support, how the February events of 1917 began, how Alexander Kerensky came to power, why the Provisional Government fell and the rebellion of General Kornilov failed, how the Civil War began. You will also hear interesting speculations about whether February Revolution planned, what would happen if a brick fell on Lenin’s head, and you will find out what truth you know from the school bench about revolutionary events- just a propaganda myth. Lectures are delivered by Boris Kolonitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the European University at St. Petersburg, Leading Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Arzamas
Collision with the abyss
For those who want to refresh their knowledge of the history of the revolution, this is perhaps the most comprehensive project. All the main stages of the revolution are described in chronological order, there are photographs and archival documents, quotes from memoirs. Interactive design will not let you get bored while reading. Events begin with the winter of 1916-1917, cover the chronicles of the dissolution State Duma, the abdication of the tsar and the creation of the Provisional Government, the "Red Funeral" on the Field of Mars, the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd, the confrontation between Milyukov and Kerensky, I All-Russian Congress Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the crisis of the Provisional Government, the Kornilov uprising and, in fact, the October Revolution itself. The project continues to grow.
TASS with the support of the State central museum modern history Russia
Great Russian Revolution
A large-scale project, the main "chips" of which are a combination of different formats and brilliant multimedia design, which will especially appeal to younger readers. Great option in order to interest the history of the revolution of high school students. But adults will also be interested. Here are written essays, and animated stories, and photographs, and video chronicles, and infographics. The narrative is divided into thematic blocks: events, persons, points of view. All this as a whole, as conceived by the creators of the project, helps the reader to compose for himself three-dimensional picture revolutionary era. Replenishment of new materials is ongoing until the end of 2017, so now is the time to evaluate it in its entirety.
Media group "Russia Today"
Revolution students
With the help of excerpts from diaries, memoirs, letters, you can look at 1917 through the eyes of students, graduate students, recent graduates and cadets cadet corps. Where were they at the most critical moments of the revolution? What did you do? What did you think about what was happening around, what did you hope for? Here, for example, is an excerpt from the chronicles of the young Konstantin Paustovsky, who was almost shot during the fighting in Moscow: “Linden trees with broken branches stood in gray frost and smoke. Mourning torches of broken gas lanterns blazed along the boulevard up to the monument to Pushkin. The whole boulevard was densely entangled with torn wires. They rang plaintively, swaying and touching the stones of the pavement. On the tram rails lay a dead horse, baring its yellow teeth.
A joint project of the youth Internet magazine of Moscow State University "Tatyana's Day" TaDay.ru and s-t-o-l.com
Another opportunity to look at revolutionary period through the eyes of contemporaries. Kommersant published a chronicle of 1917 throughout the year (all key events in a very summary), digitized issues of the Kommersant newspaper and the Ogonyok magazine, which witnessed two revolutions, and photographs of that time. Now it's hard to believe, but the catastrophe, it seems, was not expected. The issue of the newspaper of November 7, 1917 (according to the new style), for example, as if nothing had happened tells about the emerging cooperative industry in Siberia, the opening of new branches of the Eastern Bank in Moscow and publishes advertising. Another project contains short videos with historical essays and articles from modern look for those events.
Publishing house "Kommersant"
In the footsteps of the revolution
A small but interesting photo project of Radio Liberty allows you to organize an instant visual journey into the past. Only 15 photographs of memorable events of the period from 1914 to 1920 in Petrograd and Moscow: from the address of Nicholas II to the public from the balcony Winter Palace before the start of the First World War until Lenin's speech to the Muscovites at Theater Square in the midst civil war. A brief explanation is given for each photo, but the main thing is that all photos are switched in the "time machine" mode from the historical version to the modern one. You can see what exactly that place looks like now from the same angle as in the historical black and white photo 100 years ago.
»Mikhail Zygar, former editor-in-chief of the Dozhd TV channel, author of the book All the Kremlin’s Army. In addition to him, more than 100 journalists and historians worked on the project during the year, including one who participated in the launch project The Question journalist Sima Orekhanov, the creator of the "Suffering Middle Ages" Yuri Saprykin Jr. and journalist Andrey Borzenko.
According to the creators of the project, “1917. Free history" is an opportunity "to learn the history of 1917 from contemporaries and the main characters of the events of the most important year in the history of Russia in the 20th century." Every day there are updates on the site from life famous people- Emperor Nicholas II, opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin, poetess Anna Akhmatova and other key figures of the era. Everything is served in a format similar to the news feed on Facebook: short posts, live broadcasts, videos and photos. The basis of the content is letters, diaries and eyewitness accounts, slightly adapted for ease of reading.
The project has already received mixed assessment. While some are enthusiastic about the idea, others say that there is nothing new in it. The Village learned from the editor-in-chief of 1917. Free History" by Mikhail Zygar, why a new resource is needed and what goals its creators pursue.
The goal of our project is to recreate a reality that existed 100 years ago. We imagined what would have happened if there had been the Internet at that time and people were using social networks. It turned out a virtual reality, created by means of a simulator social networks. This internet is a hundred years old.
We decided to present the story under the guise of social networks, because all users are used to them. It is understandable, convenient and interesting genre. People learn from the feeds news from the lives of their friends or people important to them. We want to achieve the same effect - for people to follow the lives of heroes they already know every day.
1917 was chosen for several reasons. First, due to round date. Secondly, because this is the most important period in the history of Russia in the 20th century. It seems to me that everything that happened to us in the 20th century and is happening now is a consequence of the events of 1917. In addition, this year was the apogee of the development of our country: this period saw the peak of the development of Russian culture, literature, theatrical art And Russian society. I think that the most famous Russian people in the world lived at that time; they walked along the same streets, met and created.
Many of our heroes are celebrities: stars Silver Age, great artists, actors of the Moscow Art Theater, ballet dancers, world-famous politicians. When choosing heroes, we focused primarily not on big names, although on them as well, but on the availability of sources and their fascination. We tried to take everything we could find. We managed to select for the project not only recognizable characters, but also ordinary people. It turned out about 1,500 heroes.
We use only authentic sources, shortening some of them for easy reading, but adding nothing of our own. Some of these sources are open, others can only be found in archives. It took us a year and a large team to process all the diaries, letters and memoirs. Every day we will update the event feed so that you can follow in real time what happened a hundred years ago.
Of course, even before us, attempts were made to restore the history day by day, as well as the history of one year. But I know for sure that we are the first who not only reproduced stories from the past, but also allowed the reader to look at the world through the eyes of a hero, to feel how people felt inside the events and did not know how everything would end. It seems to me that we managed to create a genre that did not exist before. This is a genre of literature of the future, and maybe even at the junction of literature, theater, contemporary art and technologies.
Since I really believe in this genre, then, most likely, we will continue to master it using the example of other stages and countries after the end of “1917. Free History. For now, we plan to finish the project in January 2018. I do not rule out that we can change our minds and continue to implement it in a different form.
Various formats will be presented on the site. For example, on the launch day, we broadcast online the first meeting of the State Duma, which was remembered for the scandalous speech of the leader of the Duma opposition, Pavel Milyukov. There will also be the usual text recordings, videos and many online events. For example, this week the main thing will pass cultural event of 1916 - the opening of the exhibition of the association of artists " Jack of Diamonds". Users will be able to see all the pictures, find out what the authors and critics thought, how the cultural community reacted.
We announce known events in advance so that readers can plan their attendance. For example, on Thursday secret wedding Emperor's sister Princess Olga. But there are also events that happen spontaneously, such as cataclysms or murders. We do not warn about them, but broadcast them live.
In addition, we have interactive mechanisms that give a person the opportunity to communicate with one of the characters. At the launch, the most popular Russian character from a century ago, the influential preacher Grigory Rasputin, answers questions from users. In fact, this is a chat bot that operates exclusively with Rasputin's phrases.
I think people will pick their favorite characters and see how their lives unfold. For some it is very violent. For example, Nikolai Gumilyov does not write from the front to his wife Anna Akhmatova, communicating only with his beloved Larisa Reisner. Because of this, the poetess suffers a lot, and a real drama is brewing. Such storylines so many. And they are interesting to follow, so I know for sure that we will not run into a shortage of content.
Our goal is to popularize history. We want people to see in it not some boring discipline, completely divorced from reality and not directly related to them. On the contrary, we want to show that history is life. These are people just like us. And history explains a lot not only about what happened, but also about ourselves. Everyone has the opportunity to understand that he is faced with the same problems and thoughts that the person who wrote in his diary a hundred years ago faced.
