anapkin.r52.ru was a personal website titled "Caucasian Captives. (Poems of war and love)," a collection of poems by Alexander Anapkin. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru and was hosted by a Nizhny Novgorod host: the footer of the home page carried the lines "Company R 52.RU — Hosting Nizhny Novgorod" and "Coded by CJSC 'R52.RU'," as the home page reported[2]. The author's return address was on the same domain — nak@r52.ru[2]. The first web archive snapshot is dated January 20, 2002[1], the last — November 25, 2013[3]: the site stayed online for about eleven years.

What the site looked like

This was a single page with no sub-sections in the usual sense: a title, brief navigation, and poem texts running one after another. In the 2002 snapshot the navigation consisted of a single item, "Poems about Chechnya"[1]; by 2011 a second had been added — "Lyrics" — and the pair "Poems about Chechnya | Lyrics" repeated at the top and bottom of the page[2]. No visit counters, guestbook, or forum are visible in the surviving snapshots; the only form of feedback was the line "If you liked it, write to me" with an email address[2].

The page's meta description was extremely brief — "Poems of war and love" — and the keyword list spelled out the subject matter directly: poems, war, Chechnya, police, Caucasus, captivity, captive, battle, song, sad, love, lyrics, prose[1]. The same set of words, unchanged, still stood in the markup of the last snapshot in 2013[3].

What was on the page

The author is introduced on the site in a single line: Alexander Anapkin, a police officer who took part in the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya as a member of a temporary internal affairs division in the city of Gudermes[2]. The poems are written from the perspective of an officer on deployment and rest on everyday details of service: the flight and landing, a convoy moving through a mountain pass, night duty, waiting by burned-out vehicles, the road to the field hospital, counting the months until home.

By 2011 the home page had gathered about a dozen texts, some with titles — "Caucasian Captives," "Volcano," "Some Are Bound to Live," "Half an Hour," "The Pass," "A New Day," "Dedicated to the 'Kadyrovtsy'" — some untitled, separated from each other by asterisks[2]. The title poem is structured as a song, with a recurring refrain. The earlier 2002 collection was noticeably shorter and consisted only of the Chechen cycle[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

"Caucasian Captives" is a characteristic example of a personal page from the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet: a single author, a single theme, a subdomain of a local hosting provider instead of a domain of its own, and a complete absence of any commercial shell. The site never rose into the upper ranks of Counter.nn.ru and is known chiefly from its entry in the nn.ru directory, from which it entered our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. Among the winners of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote in 2004, the site does not appear either[4].

How it closed

The page's content changed almost not at all over eleven years: between the 2011 and 2013 snapshots the text remained the same[3]. The last web archive snapshot is dated November 25, 2013[3]; after that the address stopped responding, and today the domain anapkin.r52.ru no longer exists. Alexander Anapkin's poems survive only in web archive copies.

Links

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)