Currently Reading.....

This book has been a great help as I have worked on my family history book.  When I started this project about 30 years ago, I had very little original research material.  Soviet archives were closed....top secret, and I never would have imagined that it would ever change.

 Now, after a number of trips to the former USSR since 1992, I can say that I am amazed at what material I was able to collect!  But how to present it, and back up each and every thing I want to say?

 So I made the decision to basically not say anything in the book unless I could produce a document to back it up.  More difficult when dealing with Soviet era documents.

Dave Chang writes:

In the internal evidence test we determine whether the contents of the document itself point towards its reliability or otherwise. According to historian and legal scholar J. W. Montgomery, “historical and literary scholarship continues to follow Aristotle’s dictum that the benefit of doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself. This means that one must listen to the claims of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualifies himself by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies.”

 My cousin Alex, who was born in the former USSR, once told me to be careful when using Soviet-era documents, because so many of them were tainted by false accusations against people.

 So  when using some of them, I have to use the principle of "internal criticism".  That has been helpful.  I've used a document that is basically a transcript of a denunciation of one of my grandfather's brothers.  In it, it lists "anti-soviet" activities as the reason our family were so bad, and then how much land we owned.  It also gives a list of names of people that used to work for our family.  So...what do I do with this? Well, because of my numerous interviews with my grandmother, I can confirm at least one name of a person working for our family is accurate. This means that the rest of the document has a high probability of being accurate, also because of the fact I also knew that my great uncle was indeed involved in various insurrections to try to usurp communist power.

Fascinating.