Launched in 2015, the online database prozhito.org (‘Lived Through’) brings together thousands of digitized, seventeenth- to twenty-first-century diary entries, most of which were composed in Russia during the Soviet era. Created by historian Mikhail Melnichenko, the Prozhito project operates on a non-profit basis and relies on the contribution of volunteers, from the identification of sources, to their preparation and digitization. Being continually updated with transcripts from both archival sources and existing publications (either in print or online publishing), the scope for Prozhito's contribution to the Soviet research field is considerable. In the collation and digital presentation of the diaries of prominent intellectuals, professionals and also of ordinary citizens from a variety of backgrounds, Prozhito invites us to consider the lived experience of events such as the October Revolution and the Siege of Leningrad, and to allow these personal encounters and responses to influence our understanding and evaluation of historical events and contexts. Prozhito foregrounds these voices, which are routinely excluded from a dominant history that often centres around remarkable elite, powerful and often male agents and the events of their exceptional lives. In so doing, the Prozhito project has the ability to breathe new life into the historical narrative, allowing it to be coloured by the hopes, fears, woes, joys and tragedies of the lives of ordinary individuals.

Users who access Prozhito can search the database from the homepage using the name of an author, a keyword, location, a date or date range or browse within collections of diaries organized by the site manager which are brought together by a thematic congruence. While the online portal is in Russian and contains almost exclusively Russian and Ukrainian language diaries (the exception being Samuel Pepys’ diary from 1660–1669), it offers an English language version of the navigation menu, which allows English-speaking users to discern the search function. However, in order to utilize this function for results in Russian diaries, searches need to be made in Russian and the diaries remain in their original, untranslated form. Each diarist occupies their own website subpage, which features some biographical information, the origin of the source, and the status of the transcript (‘editor needed’/ ‘work in progress’), as well as an acknowledgement of the volunteers who prepared the source for publication on the database. In some cases, it remains unclear whether the volunteers worked with a manuscript or an edition of an existing publication. It also remains unclear whether the transcription and digitization was carried out with the consent of the copyright holders. Indeed, with some diaries there are no details of where the entries were copied from and whether this process was undertaken with the appropriate consent. While the project strives for accuracy and attests to coordinating with authors and heirs to safeguard copyright, without access to the original sources, researchers may question the accuracy, reliability and legality of the copies featured on Prozhito. In any case, Prozhito encourages researchers to refer to the ‘original publication or the original diary’ when quoting any writing.

The concentration of thousands of diaries from existing publications onto this single, user-friendly online portal is hugely useful. This allows readers and researchers to easily and quickly sift through data which may previously have been located across other platforms, some hard to access or requiring a subscription. For example, the digitization of Prokofiev's diaries from 1907 to 1923 on Prozhito (copied from print, with the consent of his heirs) allows for great accessibility and furthers the reach of this magnificent corpus of writing, which has become an invaluable tool for scholarly research on Prokofiev. Arguably however, the most exciting aspect of Prozhito is its work with sources previously unknown to researchers. Emphasizing the fundamentally democratic principles of the project, Prozhito ‘takes absolutely any diaries into account’Footnote ¹ and family members are encouraged to surrender the diaries of their loved ones in order to ‘give [a] voice to the unheard’.Footnote ² The result is a thought-provoking and heart-rending glimpse into the banality, joy, tragedy, absurdity and contradictions of everyday life in the Soviet Union.

While the online portal is user-friendly and with an extensive range of sources, harnessing the potential of Prozhito as a research resource is not without its challenges, complexities and limitations. My own research interests lie in the musical landscape of Soviet Russia: how discourses surrounding the politicization and proletarianization of music were received by those in the musical sphere and how they became influential and transformational within and without the Soviet Union.Footnote ³ To gauge the socio-musical experience of the ordinary Russian citizen after the Revolution through personal testimony would no doubt be hugely useful, providing a fascinating insight into how politicized musical culture resonated with audiences, first-hand. In my own research on Prozhito I have sought out individual reactions and responses to the denunciation of prominent composers in 1948, as precipitated by the infamous Zhdanov doctrine in 1946. For example, I have examined the diary of a Russian worker at the Perm Aviation Plant (sourced from the electronic publication of his diary on the Perm State Archive of the Recent History website) who writes on the campaign against ‘Muradeli, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky and even Shostakovich’. The diarist in question, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dmitriev, remarks on the capriciousness of the Central Committee's attitude towards music and questions the obligation to cater personal musical tastes and preferences to the official party line.Footnote ⁴ I have also looked within the diary of the artist, translator and creator of the first puppet theatre in Soviet Russia, Lyubov Shaporina (digitized from publication in print). In Shaporina's writing, we come to consider the doctrine in terms of her description of Stalin's ‘monstrous envy’, whereby any person's popularity (we can think of the popularity of the prominent composers targeted by the doctrine) ‘stings’ Stalin in the heart.Footnote ⁵

While the temptation is to invite these sources to influence research, it is important to first respond to the issues which arise in the curation and presentation of these types of documents as research tools. Perhaps most crucially, the use of such distinctly personal and intimate sources as research materials throws up important questions regarding ethics and reliability. When engaging with the sources featured on Prozhito, readers and researchers must address ownership and consent in regards to how the diaries, in particular the previously unpublished material, came to be featured in the database in the first place. Is it the case that the rights of these individuals over their words are revoked when they die? That their private writings become automatically submitted to the public domain when they can no longer stake a living claim to them? Do their heirs rightfully take control of these documents and publish them, sometimes despite the intentions of the authors, and does a certain passage of time make this more ethically acceptable?Footnote ⁶ While we who want to utilize the potential of Prozhito for our research may not have the answers to these complex ethical questions, keeping these issues in mind is a way of committing to responsible research that respects and honours the lives of those whom we are studying. This approach is made all the more vital considering that, when using Prozhito, we are often dealing with ‘the lives and experiences of vulnerable populations’.Footnote ⁷

A question that naturally follows is: why did the material get into the archive? While Prozhito's policy is to admit any diaries whatsoever, positing that there are ‘no unimportant diaries’, there is of course no way to know just how inclusive or exclusive the project is. Like with any presentation and curation of sources it is important to consider, as Taruskin reminds us, that, ‘reportage and evaluation are not so neatly separable. The act of selection – of choosing what shall be reported – is implicitly, and inescapably, evaluative; and evaluation is implicitly, and inescapably, contentious.’Footnote ⁸ We are thus invited to contemplate the political action of Prozhito's database, and whether the curation of sources may serve some overarching political message that may be being transmitted. While Prozhito's authors have been conscious to avoid such an intervention unto the sources, it is an important question to be thoughtful of when approaching the database.

A closer look to the reliability of such sources is also required before engaging with Prozhito as a research tool. A good place to start is to consider the role of the diaristic genre in the Soviet context. In various ways, after 1917, attempts were made, primarily by scientists and the literary avant-garde, to connect the genre with the revolutionary message and cause.Footnote ⁹ To what extent then are the views and versions of the event being expressed, the result of free independent thought? Conversely, how may they have been moulded by the influence of political dogma or appropriated to become more ideologically acceptable? How may the practice of self-censorship have affected the text? Alternatively, how may the diarists’ efforts for self-construction and reconstruction into a ‘builder of socialist society’, a ‘reworking of the self’ to align with the demands of Stalinism, be apparent within the text?Footnote ¹⁰ When looking at these sources as research tools we must look beyond apparent political subversion or support, to the often highly complex multiplicity of ways that the socio-political context of the Soviet era becomes manifested within the text and indeed how it may have influenced the text.Footnote ¹¹ Alongside this is the reliability of a diary, a text shaped by memory and inflected with emotion, characterized by subjectivity. This issue is addressed on the website's ‘About’ section where it is noted that journaling is often done in moments of personal upheaval and is, as such, ‘much more complex than just an impartial recording of events’.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, in an important point flagged by Jochen Hellbeck, we must take extra care when these texts provoke sympathy in readers. This evocation ‘breaks down analytical distance by projecting onto historical actors our own values and notions of self’. In this way we run the risk of appropriating those actors and situations in our image and ‘relativiz[ing] or discard[ing] aspects that do not fit that image’.Footnote ¹³ It is my view that it is precisely this subjectivity and ‘rawness’ of expression that makes these sources so uniquely enlightening, offering a new personal perspective through which to envisage familiar histories. The humanized history captured within these accounts requires, like any other text, critical reflection and comprehension.

The potential of Prozhito as a research resource, helping to illuminate the experiential world of the Soviet era and to contribute to our understanding of the complexities of life under Stalinism – for example how Stalinism impacted the articulation of the self and its realization within the revolutionary community – cannot be discounted. We must, however tread self-consciously and self-reflexively, ensuring as we do to maintain a sensitivity towards, and a respectful distance from, the subjects whom we are studying. While the open-access and volunteer-led format of Prozhito has numerous benefits, researchers should remember that sources may be published on the database without having been through the strict peer-review and editing process, as is required for publication on other platforms. If we are to harness the potential of Prozhito as a research resource, in the absence of consent, factuality or verification, we must ensure that we are, as I have done throughout this review, asking questions, rather than imposing our own answers. It is in this way that the documents on Prozhito, or rather the people whose voices we hear there, may speak the loudest.