Krugosvet

» see krugosvet.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The first time i went looking at krugosvet properly was to check whether it was still there. It is not. The domain does not resolve at all now, no parking page and no redirect to a successor, which is a cleaner death than most reference sites are allowed to have. Usually they linger for years as an archive nobody maintains.

What it was, underneath, is the interesting part. Collier's Encyclopedia was one of the three big american general encyclopedias of the twentieth century, printed from 1952 until it stopped in 1998. Two years after the presses stopped, its twenty four volumes reappeared on the open russian web as krugosvet, free to anyone who could reach it. The presentation was in moscow on 23 may 2000, and part of the funding came from George Soros's Open Society Institute, which spent the late 1990s pushing reference material into post-soviet countries.

A translated american encyclopedia is only half a russian one, and the editors clearly knew it. 187 russian authors were commissioned to write the parts Collier's had never had a reason to cover well. By 2010 the result ran to more than 12,700 articles, around 7,100 of them biographies, with 12,100 illustrations and 600 maps attached. Yandex at one point compared its scale to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which for a website assembled out of a dead american print set is not a small thing to be told.

~ the chronicle ~

~ where the text came from ~

Encyclopedias have always been recycled. Editors bought and re-edited each other's volumes for two centuries before anyone thought of doing it on a server, and Collier's itself was assembled that way. What made krugosvet unusual is how visible the seam was. Roughly every third article was a translation, and the russian material was written against it rather than blended into it, so you could often tell which half of the encyclopedia you were standing in.

That is also why it kept a purpose after the russian wikipedia got large. Wikipedia articles are written by whoever showed up. Krugosvet articles were written by a commissioned author or translated from a signed print original, and for anyone who needed a citable source with a name attached, that difference was the entire product. It is the same argument Encarta made and lost, arriving a few years later and in a language where the free alternative was thinner for longer.

~ the long tail ~

The money was always the weak point. Grant funding got it built, then it ran on CD sales into a market that stopped buying reference CDs, and after that on web advertising against traffic that wikipedia was steadily absorbing. Nothing about that mix was ever going to fund an editorial staff, and an encyclopedia without an editorial staff is a static file with a search box on it.

So it sat, mostly unchanged, for the better part of fifteen years, still turning up in russian search results and still cited in student work because it was free and it had authors' names on it. Then in 2025 the company was liquidated and the whole thing went off the network at once. Twenty five years online, a translation of a print set that itself had been dead since 1998, and at the end not even a redirect. The archive copies are what is left, and they are the only reason the number 12,700 can still be checked.

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