History, Reloading

Just a week after President Dmitry Medvedev creates a commission to guard against the falsification of history, he is attending the opening of the virtual library of St. Petersburg – where some 6.5 million rare Russian historical documents will be made available and open to both citizens and foreigners to access.  This is a welcome gesture of transparency (though it would be nice to see the Soviet archives go online), and may perhaps signify a recognition that the nationalism got a little out of hand following Victory Day, and that in PR terms, it played pretty poorly abroad.

Despite this, all everything went so smoothly during the library opening.  From Russia Today:

He urged staff to make sure there were no technical glitches on launch day that would prevent users from accessing the material online.

When visiting a reference room to use the electronic archive, the Russian leader was not satisfied with how it worked. He successfully logged into the system and typed “Constitution” in the search bar.

“It takes so long to load it! The files are too heavy,” the President said when he clicked to open one of the documents.

I think Mr. Medvedev’s predecessor also had a little bit of trouble locating a copy of the constitution.