Preliminary Programme

Access to the Comintern Archives has been virtually impossible for many years. In 1992, the Project for Computerization of the Comintern Archives was launched. This resulted in the creation of a comprehensive database with an inventory to the complete Comintern Archives and scanning of 1,200,000 pages from the records of the central bodies of Comintern.

The Joint Venture RusAR Publishers - which combines the complementary expertise of IDC Publishers, a Dutch academic publisher, and its Russian partner, Electronic Archives (ELAR) - made the next step in providing online access to this dataset. They developed COMINTERN online at www.comintern-online.com

COMINTERN online consists of two components: a free online inventory of the complete Comintern Archives of 55,000,000 pages and 1,200,000 digital images of the most frequently used documents, that are accessible after subscription. This unique cooperation makes the archives, that are held by the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History (RGASPI) Moscow, now worldwide accessible for research.

This offering will grow by means of international cooperation. Rosarhiv, former INCOMKA partners and the International Council of Archives are represented in the Supervisory Board of RusAR Publishers and consider new projects on opening up the Comintern Archives using both online and analog publications (Show less)

The project is devoted to creating an Atlas of the history of the Khanty
and
Mansie - the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Siberia in the late 16th
to
20th century. Their vast area was colonized by the Russian State in late

16th century and since that time both peoples were exposed to a strong
foreign political, economical and cultural influence.
The main effort in the project was not put into mapping the general
history
of the region itself, which is the traditional approach when making
atlases,
but on the history of the indigenous peoples and how the historical
events
affected their way of life. So the full detail, which used to be ignored

before would be mapped. In order to achieve this aim information was
extracted from different types of the sources: state and local laws,
official reports, correspondence between the Siberian officials,
missionaries', travelers', and exiles' diaries, complaints made by
indigenous people, folklore, tax books, archaeological investigation
reports
etc. As a result, three main clusters of ethnohistorical factors were
distinguished to be mapped: those linked with their traditions, those
which
caused the change of traditions, and innovations that were caused by the

state politics or intensive cultural interactions. Mapping of
ethnohistorical changes helps visualize the historical process and
facilitates prognoses on future developments of ethnoreligious
interaction
in the region.
As a result a set of digitized ethnohistorical maps were prepared. The next step is to include them in a future GIS Cultural Atlas of The
Khanty-Mansiesk Autonomous okrug (a federal part of the Russian
Federation). (Show less)