New project

"Archival impulse": a trace turning into an event

Sooner or later (and it would be better, of course, to be sooner but here - as it will be) an understanding comes: it is still worth establishing archives. And the issue here is not about "shaking over manuscripts" but about the important thing that comes with the awareness of the inevitability of preserving traces of the past. And the older the person, business or organization, the more clearly the contours of the archive appear. Michel Foucault, whom we often remember here, has the concept of "other space" or heterotopy. Its main property is the accumulation of another reality. The archive accumulates traces of a past life (such as the park that accumulates nature and the kindergarten that accumulates childhood). And if it is properly arranged, then it accumulates the past.

The 70th anniversary of JINR will be celebrated next year. And of course, the Institute has the administrative archive of the Secretariat, where documents of mandatory storage, protocols, official letters, papers from the personnel department are preserved. But its functions do not include accumulating oral history, organizing research and in the future, research residences. Moreover, the administrative archive has extremely little space for storing mandatory materials and the time is not far off when it will end at all. In short, it is practically impossible to endow the Secretariat archive with the functions of research history at the moment.

Further, in the laboratories, there are memorial offices of the founding fathers. And many employees retain in their offices and in memory the genuine traces of the past, by which you can study not just the history of the Institute, but the path of turning a closed laboratory into an international institute, reaching new frontiers of nuclear research, the development of Dubna as a city of scientists and the territory of international cooperation.

Galina Orlova

In order to preserve the trace and presence and then, in the footsteps to study how what this trace left was arranged, they suggested to establish the JINR Historical Archive. It all started with joint approaches to investigations that were carried out by Deputy Chief Scientific Secretary Alexey Zhemchugov and Associate Professor of the Higher School of Economics Galina Orlova, a specialist in the history of the Soviet atom that dedicated more than ten years to the investigation of Obninsk. It was how the birth of the archive started - from the cooperation of physicists with lyricists - historians and nuclear ethnographers. As a result of long conversations and discussions, there was an awareness of how many important traces are left overboard and erased and an understanding of what can be done to preserve them. Along the way, the great potential of JINR for educational purposes became clear and the well-functioning mechanism of student practices and schools at the UC allowed it to be realized not only for physicists and engineers, but also for historians and archivists. Therefore, last summer, Galina Orlova arrived with a group of undergraduates in Dubna.

Vyshkinsky descent began to draw up a map of distributed storage in order to understand how to proceed. Several undergraduates began to analyze the office of the no longer functioning synchrophasotron sector and also began to compile an inventory of the archive in the memorial office of G.N.Flerov, worked with Blokhintsev's "Thoughts" and with the archive of the desk of Yu.P.Merekov...

Last year's visit to the archive was successful and in fact, it became the starting point in establishing a historical archive. And there was also an understanding that the historical archive will function in close cooperation with the Higher School of Economics and since May this year - also with Dubna University: students from HSE and the University will come to the archive for practice and take part in projects. As a result, since the beginning of 2025, three teams of students have already strengthened the availability of the JINR historical archive with their actions, assisting it to stand on the wing. All together, it became a decisive factor in the need for a summer school and also once again allowed making sure that the historical archive at the Institute can be established only by uniting efforts.

The Archival School-Laboratory became possible because JINR decided to support it and in HSE, the application for its holding won the summer school competition that was held by the Faculty of Humanities. In addition, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences provided methodological support to the School and sent its employees to ensure archival work and transfer of archiving technologies.

A competition was announced. As a result, two people claimed the place. The geography of applications was also wide: from Tashkent to Armavir, from Tyumen to Venice. The disciplinary circle was also not small - from historians and professional archivists to architects and lawyers. It turned out to be very valuable that physicists also decided to take part in the work of the School: this is how an employee of FLNP Dimitar Chereshkov successfully passed the competitive selection and became one of the participants.

In early July, 36 students and graduate students from different universities of the country gathered in Dubna that wished to work in the archive and to understand what it was. The working and creative backbone of the School was made up of HSE undergraduates and graduate students - they also acted as curators of nine sites.

"What is the meaning of the School?" Co-Head of the Archival School Galina Orlova says. "So that representatives of various specialties can enter the archive of physicists, be useful and find the archive interesting for themselves. Therefore, the School frame - like an architectural structure - is assembled from modules: the archival educational programme introduces archiving into the basics, teaches you to distinguish inventory from list and not be afraid of documents. The JINR educational programme allows you to reduce the distance to a physical institution and a nuclear age for everyone, even humanities. Evening lectures are introduced into the context of the great twentieth century, where both hegemon physicists and major scientific and technical programmes are possible, perceived as the leading edge of modernity. And only against this background - taking into account acquaintance with laboratories, heirs and keepers - it becomes possible to move strangers to the archive. Movement that involves first accumulating and preserving traces (archiving) and then putting the archives into action (research, artistic, curatorial) - that is, activation. The uniqueness of our Archival School is not that there is a lecture hall, but there are projects at the activation stage - it usually happens at schools. And the fact that all this is built around the archive. And that the archive becomes both a focus and a public space of a special kind. Richard Sennett said that the city is a place where strangers meet. Our city is an archive."

It should be added that the participants of the "Archival impulse" brought the historical archive a considerable practical benefit. 71 new storage units appeared, inventories of materials were made in the memorial offices of Flerov and Frank, a significant part of the synchrophasotron magazines were scanned, the archive of theoretical physicist A.L.Kuzemsky was dismantled, agreements were made to carry out a series of biographical and expert interviews... In short, a serious amount of work has been implemented to make the trail an event.

And the First Summer Archival School that was held in Dubna on 6-12 July, did it.

The tour is conducted by Maria Pilipenko

School members say

Ivan Nepryakhin, a researcher at the Department of the RAS Archive Acquisition:

"What is an archive? You often hear that this is a kind of dark, semi-secret place, access to which is closed to many. Every time I talk about my archival work, I meet surprised looks and answer the question "is it boring to work there?" Even some friends imagine that all my work takes place in a small closet illuminated by dim light and in this semi-darkness I am trying to make out faded recordings of unknown persons. This picture is a vivid example of how much distance has arisen between archives and society, although the latter often awaits new documentary discoveries, awaits an answer to the mysteries of the past...

And this distance (even among professional historians) was to overcome at the Summer School "Archival impulse" held in early July. As an employee of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it was very curious and at the same time valuable to become one of the curators of the preparation of "archival placers" to the funds of the organized Historical Archive of JINR available for researchers. And it was joyful to see historians, archivists, sociologists, cultural scientists and physicists come to the Archival School. At such moments, inspiration comes: not only do you consider the archive an interesting place in which you can "touch" bygone eras and better understand them.

For me, the issue of memory became a red thread passing through all the events of the School. It doesn't matter where and how the participants worked: dismantling the archive and library bags of A.L.Kuzemsky or looking through the digital photo bank of A.K.Kuryatnikov, sorting the documentation in the memorial offices of I.M.Frank and G.N.Flerov, or collecting materials in a closet of a synchrocyclotron - regardless of the work, everyone paid attention that the archive is memory.

The archive is a place of preservation of the memory of people that lived in different historical eras and created them. This is a space that carefully remembers people and does not let you forget about them. I would like to express my sincere hope that very soon JINR will find such a place of memory, in the construction of which both physicists and residents of Dubna and friendly partners - HSE and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences will take part.

This will preserve a whole world that some seem past and lost."

Tatyana Dautova, HSE graduate student sociologist:

"I expected the School to allow me to learn about the skills of working in the archive and to understand how I can integrate it into my thesis, that is, I imagined it as a format training, where they will tell me and show me ready-made scripts. I was worried that I would be bored studying physicists! And what in the end? Everything turned out to be more interesting than I could imagine: I had to creatively navigate on the go, starting from my own ideas about research and how empirical material is revealed in reality - not only in the form of the archive that was in my hands, but also in the form that we began to accumulate ourselves, talking with witnesses and participants in events. And in a broader sense, the School not only gave a unique archival and research experience, but also really fell in love with the new object of research, with the people involved, in the city of Dubna. I want to return. Thank you so much!"

Yana Parshina, HSE:

"The technical task of scanning a series of synchrophasotron magazines of the 1960s turned into a dramatic rethinking of cooperation with technology, personal labor history and the procedurality of one's self. The ordinary task of scanning pages in the thousands posed the participants in the process with a question about the nature of their actions. Friendly communication gave way to attempts to adapt individual physicality to the mechanical style of gestures before the phonic reproduction of the scan rhythm. The inevitability of thinking about the alienation of the personal inertia degenerated into an emancipatory narrative about the liberating power of labor. The feeling of the appendage of their bodies to technology fit not only into a specific scanning situation, but also into the general breathing of JINR. Ultimately, the ghosts of the archive, followed by the School participants, for the specific and island track turned out to be nothing more than recognizable clerks-participants with audiovisual casts of the scanner of the second building of VBLHEP."

Sofya Sorokoletova, RSUH:

"We worked on the archive of the theoretical physicist A.L.Kuzemsky. The theory is most often associated with books, this case was no exception. Alexander Leonidovich was a versatile person and for each vector of his hobby, he acquired a large amount of literature, which we subsequently worked with. This amazing penetration into the life of a scientist through his reading hobby is a manifestation of the human through a large volume of personal papers and books..."

Roman Abramov, sociologist, professor at the Higher School of Economics, employee of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

"Actually, with my colleagues, what I dealt with is not yet an archive, or can be said to be an archive in potential, since it is an (not) organized array of papers with other material inclusions, collected and/or structured not by us and for other than our purposes. We carry out extraction, change, transformation, new ordering and movement of material from this array to another that becomes visible to us but may seem just as opaque to someone in the future.

In this regard, it is difficult to say where the archive starts and where it ends, or what point we can call something an archive at. Archiving is a continuing process that may have a start or at least an intermediate start but almost never can be said to end it. It is impossible to collect a complete archive of a departed person, organization, country, city, community - this is a Borges impossible task. But you can continue and last the involvement in the archive, risking being absorbed by the archive, as an unsolved thing in itself.

I remember fragments from "Solaris" by S. Lem (the one who physics and lyrics loved to read in the 1960s), dedicated to the crisis of solaristics, the symptom of which was the proliferation of libraries, publications and archives, the materials of which could not give an answer, what the researchers dealt with. In this regard, perhaps, the archiving of the accumulated at the Institute is both the creation of visible knowledge from the hidden and the liberation of the space of the organizational unconscious for the future.

And this is what Lem wrote: "It was a time of rapid swelling and expansion of archives, microfilm files. One after another, expeditions were sent, equipped with all kinds of equipment - self-recording data collectors, markers, probes - all that the Earth could give. Sometimes, more than a thousand people participated in research at the same time. However, already at a time when the pace of tireless accumulation of materials still increased, the idea that once inspired scientists became more and more fruitless. The period (that is difficult to accurately determine by time) of the decline of solaristics began."

Elena Malaya, a researcher at the JINR Historical Archive:

The Summer School "Archival impulse" has become, in a sense, an experimental event. There have long been historical, ethnographic and folklore schools in humanities circles but until recently, there has been no archival one and today, it has appeared! The co-organizers were the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAS) and the Higher School of Economics.

Looking back at the "School" week, I again plunge into its rapid rhythm. The morning began with work on nine archival sites and before that, it was necessary to check whether everyone had enough folders, envelopes, scanners, whether the inventory structure was suitable for each collection of documents. After an hour and a half of archiving and systematization of documents, the participants went to a coffee break and an archival educational programme - short 40-minute lectures. After lunch, work on the sites resumed with renewed vigor. In the evening - an hour-long lecture and at 7:00 PM - an open hour and a half lecture in the Scientists' Club. The day was completed by "watermelon talk" - an informal planning meeting, where we summed up (and accordingly, ate watermelons). The programme was so intense that in the evening, my strength sometimes was enough only for watermelon but at the same time, many participants even asked to increase the time of archival work and after lectures, they enthusiastically joined the discussions.

"Watermelon talk"

For me, two things became the most important. First, the opportunity, with the help of School participants, to accelerate the systematic archival work begun at JINR since February. Together with Anastasia Goldstein, we analyze the archives of memorial offices of great physicists, record memories and interviews with veterans of the Institute, compile inventories of photo and video collections, systematize the funds of departed employees and select materials for historical exhibitions. But two is not thirty-five: that is how many people helped us during School! During the week of collaboration, we described hundreds of units of documents, developed solutions for archiving and maintaining inventories of different funds and also came to important methodological and analytical conclusions.

The second important thing is the opportunity to share with the School participants my love for Dubna stories and people, as well as my passion for the history of Soviet science and technology. I wanted to convey the warmth which they greet us with in laboratories, share stories, archival finds, show museum corners and support us in our time travels.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to all the participants of the School, lecturers, experts and consultants from the Institute that helped us in archival work, as well as to the residents of Dubna that attended our open events."

Anastasia GOLDSTEIN