Zhdanovism

When I searched the term “Zhdanov Doctrine” on Google Chrome, 27,000 results showed up. The first result was the Wikipedia page, and the third result was Encyclopedia Britannica. I scrolled through the first five pages of Google results and, scattered amongst various wiki articles, pronunciation guides, and articles, were a few links to sources that I may find useful for my digital project. One resource is a scanned version of the Encyclopedia of Censorship, which Google Books so kindly added to the Internet. Google is helpful because it searches the web for relevant information about key word searches and puts all the results in one place. Unfortunately, it does little to put the most pertinent articles on the first page; instead, it puts popular and recent results on the first page. I found some primary source essays by Zhdanov, the creator of the Soviet doctrine, that will be interesting to read for background information on my topic, but they were on the third or fourth page of the Google search. Usually, I do not go beyond the first page when searching for things on Google. The strength of a Google search is that so many results can be found, but this is also the weakness; the proverbial gold panner must wade into the waters of Google prepared to sift through a lot of rocks and silt in order to find nuggets of gold.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica have very similar articles referring to the Zhdanov Doctrine. Both of their articles are titled something different, which threw me off at first. Wikipedia’s article is called “Zhdanov Doctrine,” whereas Encyclopedia Britannica’s is called “Zhdanovschina.” When I searched “Zhdanov Doctrine” in Encyclopedia Britannica’s search engine on their website, Andrey Zhdanov, the man, popped up, as did the term “Doctrine,” but I had to follow a link from the article on Zhdanov to get to “Zhdanovschina.”

Wikipedia and Encylopedia Britannica’s articles are only two and three paragraphs long, respectively. The information on both is the same, and they even share a few of the same sentences, such as “Earlier critics and literary historians were denounced for suggesting that Russian classics had been influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Molière, Lord Byron, or Charles Dickens.” I looked at the history of the Wikipedia page and that sentence was added in 2006 (the page has not changed much since then). I was going to look at a physical copy of Encyclopedia Britannica to see whether Wikipedia stole the line from the Encyclopedia or vice versa, but the library no longer has a physical copy of the Encyclopedia. The lady at the reference desk said that the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica came from the physical copy, so I am assuming that Wikipedia copy/pasted some parts of their article from Encyclopedia Britannica, even though they did not cite them at the bottom of the page.

One of the strengths of using Wikipedia for research is that it is accessible and easy to use. There is a Wikipedia article for nearly everything and, as I mentioned above, these articles are easy to find, usually showing up as the first search result. Additionally, Wikipedia’s structure and design is easy to use and easy on the eyes. Most long articles are broken up into sections and a table of contents provides hyperlinks to the different sections. Wikipedia’s gray, blue, black, and white aesthetic gives it a professional look and makes it easy to read. Wikipedia, however, can be edited by whomever, wherever, whenever, which makes it a less reliable source than Encyclopedia Britannica, which is maintained by a team of editors.

Encyclopedia Britannica articles were written “by external advisers and experts,” as their website says, and is now watched over by editors. Because the articles have been written by experts in their various fields, they are more reliable and can be used for scholarly research. While this is true, Encyclopedia Britannica lacks the clean-cut format of Wikipedia. I think their website is not as visually pleasing as Wikipedia or as well lain out.

While both websites have general strengths and weaknesses for research, I found them equally helpful for gaining an overview of Zhdanovism because both articles were so short and contained the same information. It would have been more helpful to have longer articles, but long articles are not the purpose of encyclopedias. 

Word Count: 723 words.