sevz.r52.ru was the website of ZAO EVZ "Sormovsky" (Experimental Wine Plant "Sormovsky"), a Nizhny Novgorod enterprise in the wine and liquor-vodka industry. The home page presented the plant as a "major industrial enterprise, a leader in wine and liquor-vodka production in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the only producer of high-quality wines and cognacs in the Volga-Vyatka region"[1]. The site operated in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru; in the web archive it survives as snapshots from April 1 to December 3, 2001[1][4], and the copyright notice in the footer is dated 2000[1].

What the site looked like

The site was arranged in the simplest possible way: a header with the enterprise's name and a single menu item — "About the company"[1]. The entire content of the home page fit into a single account of the plant, written not in dry corporate language but with colloquial turns of phrase such as "the game, as they say, is worth the candle" and "package it well — you've sold half of it"[1]. The surviving page text contains no address, no phone number, and no visitor counters[1]. The footer credits the developer — "Web Design by Teamoty Brane Inc"[1].

Over the eight months covered by the web archive's snapshots, the home page text did not change: the April, July, October, and December 2001 snapshots match word for word[1][2][3][4].

What the plant said about itself

The page's main theme was natural raw materials. According to the home page, only "purely natural raw materials" were used for its vodkas and liquor-vodka products: vanilla was bought as whole pods rather than a synthetic substitute, red pepper was "genuine whole pod pepper, from India," cranberries came from the Komi Republic, and rowan berries were "gathered in the deep forests of Zavetluzhye"[1]. Among the plant's brands named on the page were "Ryabinovaya na Konyake" (Rowan on Cognac), "Klyukvennaya" (Cranberry), "Zveroboy" (St. John's Wort), and "Starka"; the page stated outright that the origin of the herbs used for "Zveroboy" and of the leaves of particular apple and pear varieties used for "Starka" was a trade secret[1].

The second recurring theme was production modernization. The page listed four-position labeling machines, equipment for affixing excise stamps, and a section for wrapping bottles in heat-shrink film[1]. The "main pride" named was a fully computer-controlled automated bottling line, purchased under contract from an Italian concern; according to the page, it was meant to eliminate the "human factor" entirely[1]. The name of the concern is not given on the site[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belongs to the early layer of corporate presence of Nizhny Novgorod enterprises online: a third-level domain in the r52.ru zone, a single business-card page, no interactivity of any kind — no product catalog, no price list, no feedback form[1]. In our materials it is known from the nn.ru catalog directory; it does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, and we have no data on its traffic. In the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the domain sevz.r52.ru does not appear[5] — though by the time of the vote the site had already gone three years without an update. For more on the methodology and limits of our samples, see the article Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating; for the general context of the era, see Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The last web archive snapshot of the home page is dated December 3, 2001[4]; in total, four snapshots have been preserved in the archive[1][2][3][4]. At the time of our check, the domain sevz.r52.ru does not exist, and no redirect to another site was found. The circumstances of the site's closure and the enterprise's subsequent fate cannot be traced from the sources available to us.

Sources

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