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Yves Montand in the USSR interviews, source

montint-src

Persistent Identifier of this resource:

http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2020081501

Access location: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2020081502

This corpus is available for download in Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland.

NB: When processing personal data in this resource, the user must comply with the resource-specific data protection terms and conditions, see http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2021050624.

The topic of the interview data are the personal memories and family stories about the tour of French-Italian singer-actor Yves Montand in the Soviet Union in 1956-57. It was collected in September-November 2019 in Russia (and in distant communication method abroad). It was part of Oral History – Theory, Practice and Uses. Case Montand in the USSR course held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow by Dr. Mila Oiva (University of Turku, Finland) and Dr. Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk (Associate Professor, Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, Higher School of Economics, Moscow). Twenty two out of total twenty four interviews were allowed by the respondent to be used in the book by Bruce Johnson, Mila Oiva and Hannu Salmi Yves Montand, Cultural Diplomacy, and the USSR (tentative title, Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming).

The students collecting the data were (in alphabetical order):

Daria Artemova
Alexander Bespalov
Ivan Karnaukhov
Elizaveta Karpova
Takhmina Kasimova
Daria Khokhlova
Anna Koliberskaya
Maria Korenko
Anastasia Kurasheva
Sofia Kuznetsova
Maxim Larichev
Lidia Larkina
Ilia Lukhovitskii
Alexandra Mikhailidi
Angelina Naumova
Anna Ostapenko
Yana Parshina
Polina Protasova
Daria Umanets
Marina Zucconi


The idea of the interviews was to collect information on how Yves Montand’s tour in the Soviet Union was remembered in Russia in autumn 2019, either by people who had experienced the visit in a way or another by themselves, or based on stories the respondents had heard from their family members, relatives and friends concerning Yves Montand.
The dataset contains altogether 22 interviews, out of which 15 were interviews with female respondents, 7 male respondents, and 2 group interviews of 2-5 respondents of both sexes. Most of the students worked on their own, but there were also two groups of two-three students working together. The year of birth of the respondents varied between 1936-1999. The place of interview (or the respondents were located at during the telephone, Skype, or WhatsUp interview) was in 15 cases Moscow, and once in St.Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Shchyokino (Tula Region) in Russian Federation, and in Lille (France). In some cases, the respondent refused of being recorded, and this interview is based on the hand-written notes of the interviewer. All but two of the total 24 interviews were allowed to store in the Finnish Social Sciences Data Archive. All the interviews were conducted in Russian.

The students identified the interviewees by asking their parents and grandparents, their friends and relatives, and by contacting Yves Montand groups in social media and through libraries. Some of the respondents felt it more convenient to record an audio file by themselves, or to read the interview questions in advance, and talk based on them. Two of the agreed interviews did not eventually take place. The students were advised to respect the wishes of the respondents so that they would feel themselves comfortable, and would not feel pressure to do anything against their will. The students were also advised to contact the teachers in case of uncomfortable situations with the respondents. Some students reported of either grumpy respondents or untidy premises, but did not feel threatened.

The students formed in a joint effort the interview question scheme (see Attachment). The interviews were semi-structured, meaning that the students were advised to follow the theme of memoirs concerning Yves Montand’s tour, but not to stick to the questions if they did not feel suitable. The main thing was to follow what the respondents remembered and had to say about Montand’s visit. Many students commented that they did not need to ask many questions, and they could just follow what the respondents wanted to say about the topic.

The students were advised to transcribe the interviews so that the spoken text was “transformed” into written text, and they would insert signifying elements of the discussion, such as laughs and so on. Furthermore, they were asked to add some meaningful notions concerning the interview they considered relevant for understanding the interview. The students stored the audio files, transcriptions, metadata, and scanned agreements to the joint project folder. After that, the students peer-reviewed each other’s interview transcriptions and gave each other advise on how to improve the transcription.
The Higher School of Economics in Moscow is one of the top level universities in Russia, and therefore it is plausible that the most of the respondents also represent the more highly educated, urban population in Russia. Although the main point of interest of the interviews was to study the memories of Yves Montand’s tour in the Soviet Union in 1956-1957, it is important to keep in mind that Montad visited the Soviet Union also in the 1960s in the Moscow film festival, and therefore it is possible that some of the respondents’ memoirs refer also to that visit.

The original research based on this data has been described in, e.g., the following publication:
Oiva, Mila; Salmi, Hannu; Johnson, Bruce (2021). Yves Montand in the USSR: Cultural Diplomacy and Mixed Messages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69048-9