The Oddities of Graduate Research in the post-Soviet era.

After taking a lengthy, and may I say well-deserved, break from thesis work, I have returned to the library (in the midst of some of the best weather of the summer) to patch the varied and many leaky holes in my rather hastily drafted thesis. I have to say that it is nice to be able to research with nothing else on my mind. Researching while doing coursework was a real bother, but I think that with little else to do, I can focus my intellectual energies into the narrative of this story I'm trying to write.

The problem lies in the fact that I am a post-Soviet scholar. It's a bit odd to be saying this over 15 years after the collapse of communism in Russia, but circumstances require that I think about this phenomenon considerably. Essentially, my problem is that, apart from the archival documents I've read, I have had to rely on sources (in English) written by British and American historians from the 70s and 80s. These historians, while doing the best they could with what was at hand, were at a considerable disadvantage as far as sources available to them. Often they had to work with limited materials and only one woman had access to the archives, and even that was limited. I, on the other hand, have total access to the organization's files and to a number of journals that others have not had. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that, at the tender age of 25, I am one of the world's leading experts on the Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARK/ARRK).

You'd think that such a realization was invigorating and it kind of is (as much as I don't want to toot my own kazoo, so to speak). There is another side to it, however. Studying this organization inevitably provokes questions that need answering. I have tried to answer some of these questions to the best of my ability, but inevitably some are simply out of reach either due to time or resource constraints. This being the case, I have fallen back on some of the conclusions of these Soviet-era historians.

Well, in the last few days I have returned to the library and read through some of these journals. It seems that every day I come across some new piece of information that severely undercuts some of the conclusions that I rely on. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to fill these gaps and to answer the new questions that keep popping up satisfactorily. So as I spackle one hole in the drywall, I make another. It's frustrating.

So essentially my dilemma is this: I know more about this film organization than almost anyone else in the world (I don't know if there's an even more eminent authority in Russia). Unfortunately, even I know very little. Since I can't, in the words of Sir Isaac Newton, stand on the shoulders of giants, I have to rely on my own humble intellectual prowess. So it looks like, for the sake of prosperity, the blind are leading the blind here. It's like each new day brings frustrations that didn't exist the day before. Sometimes I just want to pull my hair out.

But, I have to admit, it's a pretty exhilarating experience.