InaDWriMo

OK, my dear lost readers. I’m back. Because I just found out about the International Dissertation Writing Month, and I think it’s just a fabulous idea (and yes, the first one was last year, but guess what! It’s happening again!)
I actually have no idea what word goal is realistic, so let’s say 15,000 in [...]

defenders of the fatherland

in which the author rants, rambles, and gets rather grim

tanks

This one is for Chris.
A cool thing about wandering all alone around a museum, with not a curator in sight, is that you can touch things. Now, I’m a sensible and law-abiding person and wouldn’t touch paper or fabric or really old things or anything under glass, so one can safely let me wander around [...]

I have largely moved from the archives to the museum of Uralmash history. Uralmash – short for “Ural machine-building plant” – was an industrial giant built in 1933. It turned iron ore into heavy factory machinery in the 30s, into tanks and artillery during the war, and into excavators and oil drilling equipment starting in [...]

I’ll write up some of my dissertation-y musings, but for now I bring you news from the Uralmash girls’ dormitories, 1959:
“Even in dormitory #2, which is very cultured, there are these festering sores. Take, for example, the retired auntie Shura Perunova, who lives in a separate little room in this dormitory, the supervisors’ room. The [...]

judgments

I’m currently researching the part of my dissertation where my engineers get prosecuted by the state. Or don’t, as the case may be. The jury (i.e. statistical analysis and close reading of documents) is still out, but it seems like they’ve been able to get away with a hell of a lot compared to what [...]

I got almost no work done this afternoon. I showed up at the archive and all, but my documents didn’t show up until four, and even then the ruckus in the room was such that focused reading was perfectly impossible and I couldn’t skim, because I just started on an entirely new collection. Criminal [...]

archives, a scattershot overview of the week

I found the architecture commission stuff, in the most obvious place. Feel like an idiot. When in doubt, check the guide…
I will be sorely tempted to get a research assistant to type in all the stats I’m finding.
Missing: a few hundred pages of questionnaires. I hope they at least went to a [...]

Sverdlovsk news circa 1949

Mr Rempel, DSc, gave a lecture on “Atomic energy and its uses” in the Sverdlovsk psychiatric hospital, to a 62-person audience.
Countless Komsomol membership cards were stolen in trams. One, however, was “cut up into little pieces by [the bearer's] younger brother while [the bearer] was in the next room,” one burned in a house fire, [...]

in which the author is puzzled