Thomas de Waal’s interview project started as most good oral history and archival projects do: with the unearthing of an object that triggers memories and curiosity. This time it was a box of dusty cassettes.
Thomas de Waal’s interview project started as most good oral history and archival projects do: with the unearthing of an object that triggers memories and curiosity. This time it was a box of dusty cassettes.
Mr. de Waal spoke with some sixty participants and policymakers during the struggle between former Soviet Republics Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, and conflict of Russia with the breakaway republic of Chechnya. He only used a fraction of these interviews for two books he authored, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York University Press, 1998) and Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York University Press, 2003). Lucky for researchers and policy analysts, Rob Davis, Librarian for Russian, Eurasian & East European Studies, and the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies embarked on a large-scale digitization and transcription project.
The result?
The Thomas de Waal interview collection is the first audio collection available through our Digital Collections Portal. Sixty-seven Russian-language interviews were fully or partially transcribed as part of the collection.
You can locate the finding aid for the de Waal interviews through our Archival Collections Portal. The collection is available only on restricted workstations onsite in RBML; here’s how to visit us to see and hear this timely collection.
Hat tip to our Columbia Library colleagues and departments for bringing this collection to fruition: our head of collections management, Jane Gorjevsky; Rob Davis, Librarian for Russian, Eurasian & East European Studies; and the Digital Library and Scholarly Technologies team headed by Stephen Davis.
Read more about the project in Harriman Institute Magazine