nnov.pravda.ru was the address of the Nizhny Novgorod page of the online outlet "PRAVDA.Ru," which operated in the first half of the 2000s. It was not a stand-alone site but the lowest level of the large outlet's rubricator: the path to the page read as "Home / Russian Federal Districts / Volga Region / Nizhny Novgorod"[3]. The section's tie to Nizhny Novgorod was direct: the feed consisted almost entirely of material about the city and region — the municipal bond issue by the Nizhny Novgorod city administration, layoffs at the Gorky Automobile Plant, Dzerzhinsk and Pavlovo[1], and Kstovo[3].

No dedicated editorial office with a Nizhny Novgorod address and phone number is visible in the surviving screenshots: the service links "For Advertisers," "About Us," "Site Map," and "News Export" led into PRAVDA.Ru's shared infrastructure, and the footer carried the copyright line "©1999-2004 'PRAVDA.Ru'" and the line "Hosting provided by.masterhost"[2].

What the home page looked like

The top menu was shared across the whole outlet: "Home," "World," "Politics," "Culture," "Sport," "Economy," "Science and Technology," "Society," "Incidents," "Health," "About the Project." Separate links led to the English and Portuguese versions of the outlet[1]. The side column expanded the "Russian Federal Districts" section — Center, Northwest, South, Siberia, Far East, Volga Region, Urals — with the Volga Region broken down by city: Nizhny Novgorod, Ulyanovsk, Kazan, Saransk, Cheboksary, Saratov, Penza, Kirov, Izhevsk, Ufa, Orenburg, Kudymkar, Yoshkar-Ola, Samara, Naberezhnye Chelny, Tolyatti, Perm[2].

Only the middle column, with the headline feed, actually belonged to Nizhny Novgorod; all the rest of the space was taken up by the surroundings of the large portal — a row of product sections ("Mobile Communications," "Laptops," "Perfumery," "MP3 Players," "Digital," "Refrigerators," "Televisions"), forum excerpts, a Fark.Ru block, and "Front Page Highlights"[1]. The service column listed "Information Partners" — NTA "Privolzhye" — as well as the links "What Our Colleagues Are Writing," "Advertising," and "Statistics"[2]. The footer ended with a line the screenshots offer no explanation for: "'PRAVDA.Ru' does not recommend using Xerox equipment"[1].

The Nizhny Novgorod feed

The feed's content fell into two parts. Business and city news — the agreement between the Nizhny Novgorod city administration and ROSBANK to organize a bond issue, payment of the second coupon on the municipal loan, a report that "VolgaTelecom" would buy NSS for 20 million dollars, the upcoming layoff of about 7,000 workers at the Gorky Automobile Plant, the Nizhny Novgorod region's shortage of funds for the first tranche on its eurobond, 122 facilities left unfinished since Soviet times in the region, a rupture of the "Volgotransgaz" main gas pipeline (Nizhny Novgorod was barely affected, Kstovo took the brunt), and the transfer of a venerated icon with the relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov from the Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent to the Transfiguration Old Fairground Cathedral — some of these items marked as sourced from NTA "Privolzhye"[3].

The second part consisted of features and local-history pieces: a story about Valery Chkalov's last flight, an account of a Gorky-native deserter based on a KGB colonel's memoirs, a piece on how Gorky NKVD officers built wooden decoy aircraft during the Battle of Stalingrad, and a feature on Russia's only goose fights, held in Pavlovo[1]. The earliest date on the front page of the feed was November 22, 2002[3].

The three surviving screenshots show the section had nearly stopped being updated. In June and August 2004 the feed opened with the same item, dated November 11, 2003[1][2]. By December 15, 2004, exactly one new publication had been added at the top — dated September 18, 2004 — and the feature "A Lady from Kostroma with a Little Dog," judging by its title and blurb, had nothing to do with Nizhny Novgorod[3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The section entered the Nizhny Novgorod Internet from outside: it was set up not by a local outlet but by a federal one that sliced the country into districts and cities. In the nn.ru directory it was listed with the description "a special section of 'PRAVDA.Ru' devoted to Nizhny Novgorod and the region" — and that is nearly the sum total of its traces in the local network. The address nnov.pravda.ru does not appear among the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results[4]; it likewise does not appear in our samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter — see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. No visitor counter of its own is visible in the surviving text of the home page; the "Statistics" link belonged to the outlet's shared service block[2].

How it closed

No separate announcement of the section's closure appears in the screenshots. The web archive's index for this address logs only five captures in total: the first dated June 5, 2004[1], the last home-page snapshot dated January 25, 2005[5]. In the meantime, over more than a year — from November 11, 2003 to December 15, 2004 — a single new item appeared in the feed, so the section stopped being filled long before the final snapshot. Today the address does not respond: the domain nnov.pravda.ru no longer exists.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, June 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, August 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, December 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, January 2005 (archive)