May 1, 2023
Hello,
This is the first RIMA mailing list. Our names are Anna Nemzer and Ilia Venyavkin. Once a month we will write to you to tell you how our Archive of Independent Russian Media is developing.
We have launched a digital archive https://rima.media/. Now we have 13 media in our collection and more than half a million materials. Right now, you can search for content by date, genre, and publication source. We are particularly pleased that we were able to collect materials from the Russian Newsweek website, one of the key social and political media of the 2000s.
Now we are thinking about how to develop the archive further. First of all, we need to decide what materials to add to the archive next.
<aside> 💡 Please share your opinion with this poll
</aside>
Even now, on a small volume of the collection, we are faced with interesting cases. In the first months of the full-scale war, Elena Kostyuchenko, a special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, was in Ukraine and wrote reports from Kherson, Odesa, and Mykolaiv. Then these texts were printed in “Novaya” with omissions (“Novaya” tried to fulfill censorship requirements in order to remain in the legal field). Soon, at the request of the Russian authorities, these reports were completely removed from the site. Then other media located not in Russia reprinted them in full.
Today, these reports with gaping holes in place of the word “war” are no less impressive than the same texts in the full version.
In our archive you can read these three texts in their entirety as they were first published in Novaya:
— Kherson
— Mykolaiv
— Odesa