A:Our web site is designed to introduce students and the general public to the richness and contradictions of Soviet history. It has chosen 17 years and provided a cross-section of Soviet life at that time. It covers politics, society, culture and economics, and seeks to enable its users to experience a given time through the words, sounds and sights that a common Soviet citizen would have encountered. We hope with this web site to help students and readers understand the more complicated truth about Soviet history, that at all time, the Soviet Union offered experiences of great good and great evil. Soviet citizens were forced to understand them as a whole. The object of this web site is to give users a sense of what this total experience was like, using the original words of the participants. We have selected from Soviet history seventeen moments - following the title of a beloved spy series of the seventies - almost at random but not entirely.

For teachers, the site offers a rich variety of materials for use in classes and elsewhere. Teachers can use the My Syllabus feature to create a web page to guide their students through a particular curriculum, or allow their students to browse the site according to their own interests. The site is presently at use in courses at over 100 universities, high schools and even elementary schools across the world, mostly in English-speaking countries.

Q:What is My Syllabus and how does it work?

A:My Syllabus is a syllabus creator. The feature allows teachers to build an HTML syllabus with links to specific sources in http://www.soviethistory.org. The My Syllabus link is located at the very top right of the page, next to Home and My Account. My Syllabus is only accessible to registered users.

A syllabus itself is a list of links which link to selected content on www.soviethistory.org. You can choose which link you would like to add. Just click on "Add to syllabus" which is placed to the top right of every content entry. In My Syllabus you'll see all the links that you've added. You can now rearrange and/or remove them from the syllabus. The "Export as HTML" link will let you save the syllabus as a html-file. You can still edit (rearrange, add and remove links) the syllabus on www.soviethistory.org and export it again. You can also delete the syllabus and create a new one. This file you can send to your students.

If you wish to add readings from other sources to your html-syllabus, or to add other information, questions or links, you can do this by using any HTML editor. Sea Monkey, the open-source HTML-editor developed by the group that created Firefox, would be a good choice here.

Q:How can I show texts in large format for display in the classroom?

A:The "Print" link at the top of every document will open a new page without the side navigation columns. You can use the "Zoom In" function of your browser to display the text in large font, and expand the page from dragging the bottom left-hand corner. Unfortunately the site does not yet have a large-format option for videos - this will be the object of a future update of the site.

Q:How can I add a location marker to an essay or article?

A:Location markers can only be placed by a user with administrative access. Please email your request with the "Contact us" link at the bottom of the page, and a marker will be placed on the appropriate map.