bcr-nizhegorodets.r52.ru — the site of a Nizhny Novgorod car company, "BTsR-Nizhegorodets" (BCR-Nizhegorodets), which operated in the first half of the 2000s. An early snapshot of the home page presents the owner as OOO "Trading House 'Nizhegorodets'" with a legal address in Sarov (607190, Murzupova Avenue, 17a, Nizhny Novgorod Region) and a sales lot in Nizhny Novgorod on Moskovskoye Shosse, 34; the contacts given were the phone numbers (8312) 41-13-09 and 41-18-94 and the email nizhegorodets@r52.ru[1]. In the web archive the address is recorded from October 24, 2001 to May 15, 2006[5]; at the time of our survey the domain no longer exists.

The 2001 home page

The first saved snapshot is a single-page text business card with no navigation. It sets out the firm's history: since 1993 "Nizhegorodets" had been the general representative of OAO "GAZ", and, as the home page put it, the joint work with the automotive plant had become so close that the firm could be considered "a kind of extension of the OAO 'GAZ' assembly line"[1]. Since 1997 the company had been listed as the official NISSAN dealer for the Volga-Vyatka region; that same year saw the opening of the "Nizhegorodets-BOSCH-Autoservice" service station — repair, warranty, and maintenance service for European- and Japanese-made cars. In November 1999, according to the same text, the largest car showroom in Nizhny Novgorod, "Nizhegorodets," opened[1].

The page was arranged more like a business form than a storefront: it lists the taxpayer ID (INN) 5254017367, checking and correspondent accounts at ZAO "AKB 'Sarovbiznesbank'" in Sarov and bank codes, and at the bottom, the signatures of two executives: the president of the firm "Nizhegorodets," A. L. Goikhman, and the general director of the trading enterprise "Nizhegorodets," E. A. Zhalyalotdinov[1]. The snapshot has neither a model catalog, nor prices, nor an order form.

From trading house to ZAO NOAK

By April 2003 the site had changed both its design and its name: the snapshot's heading reads "Automobile Company 'BTsR-Nizhegorodets'," the footer carries a 2001 copyright, a credit to the developer ("Coding: Info — online"), a note pointing to hosting on r52, and a link to the "Nizhny Novgorod Auto Market"[2]. The March 2004 snapshot is signed differently again — "Official website of ZAO NOAK 'BTsR-Nizhegorodets'," with a 2002 copyright[3]. So over three years the archive shows a change of name and of legal form: the "Nizhegorodets" trading house became "BTsR-Nizhegorodets," and then a joint-stock company.

No substantive content survives in the 2003 and 2004 snapshots: only the heading and footer remain of both versions, while the main content, apparently, was placed in internal frames and did not make it into the home page's index[2][3]. What the showroom's menu looked like in those years cannot be reconstructed from the archive. In the catalog listing on nn.ru, through which the site entered our sample, the abbreviation NOAK is expanded as "Nizhny Novgorod United Automobile Company," and a FORD dealership for the Volga-Vyatka region is added alongside GAZ and NISSAN; this cannot be verified from the surviving snapshots of the site itself.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The domain belonged to the r52.ru zone — one of the Nizhny Novgorod zones of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet, and the site's hosting is explicitly listed as r52[2]. The site, however, left no noticeable public trace in local rankings. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, and no attendance figures for it are recorded in our data: the site entered the survey through the nn.ru catalog, not through the ranking samples. In the published results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the address bcr-nizhegorodets.r52.ru does not appear, although other sites of the r52.ru zone are represented in it[4].

Judging by what survives, the site was a company profile, not a community project: an address in the local zone, corporate details, a short history, and one link to an industry site[1][2].

How it closed

The web archive's index holds 31 records for the home page's address, the last of which is dated May 15, 2006[5]. No later saved versions exist. Our data records no information about a move to another address, and there are no grounds to claim the site continued under a different domain. The domain bcr-nizhegorodets.r52.ru itself no longer exists at the time of our survey, so what remains of the site are three archived snapshots of the home page: a detailed text business card from 2001 and two nearly empty shells from 2003 and 2004.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org (archive)