What is history? It is something written by the winners. There is a stereotype that history should be focused on the rulers, like Lenin or Trotsky. As a result, people in many countries, like mine, Russia, look at history as something that was predetermined or determined by the leaders, and common people could not influence it in any way. Many Russians today do not believe that Russia could ever have been or ever will be a truly democratic nation, and this is due to the way history has been framed to the citizens of Russia. And this is not true.
To prove it, I spent two years of my life trying to go 100 years back, to the year 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. I asked myself, what if the internet and Facebook existed 100 years ago? So last year, we built a social network for dead people, named Project1917.com. My team and I created our software, digitized and uploaded all possible real diaries and letters written by more than 3,000 people 100 years ago. So any user of our website or application can follow a news feed for each day of 1917 and read what people like Stravinsky or Trotsky, Lenin or Pavlova and others thought and felt. We watch all those personalities being ordinary people like you and me, not demigods, and we see that history consists of their mistakes, fears, weaknesses, not only their "genius ideas."
Our project was a shock for many Russians, who used to think that our country has always been an autocratic empire and the ideas of freedom and democracy could never have prevailed, just because democracy was not our destiny. But if we take a broader look, it's not that black and white. Yes, 1917 led to 70 years of communist dictatorship. But with this project, we see that Russia could have had a different history and a democratic future, as any other country could or still can. Reading the posts from 1917, you learn that Russia was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, or one of the first ones to grant women voting rights.
Knowing history and understanding how ordinary people influenced history can help us create a better future, because history is just a rehearsal of what's happening right now. We do need new ways of telling history, and this year, for example, we started a new online project that is called 1968Digital.com, and that is an online documentary series that gives you an impression of that year, 1968, a year marked by global social change that, in many ways, created the world as we know it now. But we are making that history alive by imagining what if all the main characters could use mobile phones ... just like that? And we see that a lot of individuals were facing the same challenges and were fighting for the same values, no matter if they lived in the US or in USSR or in France or in China or in Czechoslovakia.
By exposing history in such a democratic way, through social media, we show that people in power are not the only ones making choices. That gives any user a possibility of reclaiming history. Ordinary people matter. They have an impact. Ideas matter. Journalists, scientists, philosophers matter. We shape society. We all make history.
Thank you.
(Applause)
