Research Guides: Russian and Slavic Studies resources: History

Primary sources at NYU

Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new window
Readex AllSearch allows users to cross search primary sources: books, pamphlets, newspapers, government documents, and more.
Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War This link opens in a new window
Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War contains British government secret intelligence and foreign policy files from 1873 – 1953. The content enables rich research into the intelligence, foreign policy, international relations, and military history in the period of Appeasement, through the Second World War, and into the early Cold War. Provides insights into Britain’s spies, security agents, codebreakers, and more.
Cold War Eastern Europe This link opens in a new window
Provides access to 6,000+ primary source files from the political departments of the U.K. Foreign Office. During the Cold War, the U.K. Foreign Office and their embassies and consulates throughout Eastern Europe were interested in every aspect of political, economic, cultural, social, and dissident life behind the “Iron Curtain.” Reports covered a hugely diverse range of issues, from state leadership to protest movements; agricultural output to international trade agreements; scientific progress to minority populations; religion to sporting events; and state run media to popular culture.

Tamiment Collection: Guide to the CPUSA
The Communist Party of USA archive contains documents, audio recordings and state-produced documentaries and amateur films from the former Soviet Union and other communist nations as well as documents related to the cooperation between communist parties of the USSR and USA.

Primary sources beyond NYU

Eurodocs
Eurodocs provides open access to European primary historical documents, including video clips, maps, photographs, databases. Documents arranged chronologically.
Proceedings of the Caucasian Archeological Commission, 1886-1904.
A great part of the original Russian records have been lost through the ravages of time, war, accident and earthquake. But a unique collection of archive documents has been preserved, showing the consequences of conquest or annexation by the Russian Empire and details of the many boundaries which were established by Tzarist officials in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the direction of the Russian Governor-General in the Caucasus, the Archives of the Central Administration from 1802 to 1862 were gathered together and published between 1866 and 1904 in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia: some 14,000 of the most important documents were published including many secret service reports about the situations in Turkey and Persia. A handlist of the contents, in English, has been prepared by staff at the Board of Scientific Editors in Tbilisi (Tiflis), Georgia as an aid to research.
Wilson Center Audio Archive of Soviet and Russian History
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online.
The project consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. The chronological range is between 1917 and the mid-1940s.
Stalin Digital Archive
The archive provides access to primary source materials from Stalin's personal papers and insightful monographs on communism. In addition, it seeks to advance research and teaching through new ways for scholars and students to interact with this content and collaborate. The Annals of Communism series contains 25 volumes of scholarly commentary, annotation, and interpretation of documents from state and party archives selected by teams of Western and Russian editors. These volumes span the history of Soviet and international communism.
History of Russia in photographs
History of Russia in Photographs (История России в фотографиях) is a photobank of Russian photographs from 1860-1999, with captions, tags, and a search engine. It is sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture, and the Russian search engine Yandex. The photos come from museums, public archives, and personal collections.
Making the History of 1989
A George Mason University project which assembles primary sources from former Soviet Union and satellite countries about events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
US National Security Archive / Russian program
From the site: "Russia Programs work to increase understanding and cooperation between Russia and the United States by documenting history of U.S.-Soviet-Russian relations, creating connections between scholars and practitioners and engaging the next generation of students in joint learning and research on the issues of mutual security, nuclear weapons and diplomacy with the emphasis on increasing empathy in U.S.-Russian relations today. "
Soviet Archive of Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky scanned scores of documents from briefly-opened-and-shot KGB archives. The quality is far from optimal, but the materials are hard to come by otherwise.
Istoricheskie Materialy
Crowdsourced collection of scanned historical documents, primarily focusing on Soviet history.

Socialism on Film This link opens in a new window
Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda: This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba.

Aleksander Yakovlev Archive
A vast collection of Soviet-era documents on various aspects of Soviet history.
Memorial Archive and Collections
The largest Russian repository of documents related to the history of Soviet political repressions.
The Corpus of Russian Translations of the Political Thought
The corpus of 18th-century political treatises and other genres of political writings into Russian. The project of the German Historical Institute in Moscow explores the process of the transfer, adaptation and reception of the main European political ideas and concepts in Russia during the eighteenth century. The originals and translations are presented in their entirety. The interface is available in Russian and English.
Digital library of historical documents
644 collections of primary sources published in Russia since 1991 and made available in open access.
Stalinka: Digital Library of Staliniana
The online collection comprises visual images of photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, etc. relating to Stalin/ism. Materials collected in the University of Pittsburg.
Wilson Center Digital Archive
The Digital Archive is a resource where students, researchers and specialists can access once-secret documents from governments and organizations all over the world.
Constructed and maintained by the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program, the Digital Archive contains newly declassified historical materials from archives around the world—much of it in translation and including diplomatic cables, high level correspondence, meeting minutes and more. The historical documents presented in the ever-expanding Digital Archive provide fresh, unprecedented insights into recent international history. By making new sources available and easily accessible, the Digital Archive serves to deepen and enrich international scholarship, history education, and public policy debate on important global issues and challenges.
Archives of St. Petersburg
Centralized portal for searching archival collections of St. Petersburg
Study of Dissidence and Samizdat at University of Toronto Library
The Electronic Archive “Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat” (PSDS) includes the database of Soviet samizdat periodicals, electronic editions of selected samizdat journals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists. The Project aims to make rare materials more widely available and to provoke questions about the trajectories of groups and individuals within the varied field of Soviet dissidence and nonconformist culture.

Pamphlets

Inventory of the Hoover Institution Library Pamphlet Collection.
This inventory lists 54,787 pamphlets held by the Hoover Institution Library. The pamphlets relate to twentieth-century political, social, and economic issues around the world. Although the pamphlets are in many different languages, about 33,000 are in English, 10,000 are in German, and 3,000 are in Russian.

Subscription periodicals

Russkii Arkhiv Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
Russkii Arkhiv (Русскiй Архивъ) is monthly journal of history and literature, published in Moscow in 1863-1917. Founded by P.I. Bartenev, a longtime editor of the journal, and intended to make a comprehensive coverage of Russian history. A rich collection of primary sources on Russian history of 18th and 19th century, it contains a lot of materials on key political and cultural personalities: memoirs, diaries, correspondence and official documents of members of the royal family, government officials, and members of aristocratic and ruling classes; materials related to social, legal and philosophical thought with an emphasis on Slavophilism; materials on Alexander Pushkin; and diaries of exiled Decembrists, among other texts. The database also includes several indexes ("предметная роспись"), as well as literary supplements. The journal was published before the Russian orthography reform of 1917, East View has added article-level keywords, bibliographic references, and other metadata to improve the database’s search functionality.
Krasnyi Arkhiv This link opens in a new window
Krasnyi Arkhiv was published by the Central Archives of the USSR and Central Archival Administration from 1922-1941. It includes nineteenth and twentieth century archival documents regarding the development of the Bolshevik movement, the Russian Communist Party, the Russian Civil War, Russian foreign policy, history of Russia in Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan, as well as literary historical documents on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and other Russian writers and critics. Full text article-level search/browse functions.
Historical Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Indexes more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages. Publication dates of coverage: 1955 to present.

Open access periodicals

Журнал "Историческая экспертиза" ("Historical expertise")
“The Historical Expertise” is a journal of the Russian historians’ community. The first issue was released in 2014. Since 2015 it is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal. Each issue has around 350 pages. The journal has both printed and online versions. Editorial board and editorial council include leading researchers from Russia, Europe and the United States.

History of the Russian Diaspora

Russia Beyond Russia: The André Savine Digital Library
Russia Beyond Russia: The André Savine Digital Library brings together André Savine’s research on the Russian diaspora, the holdings of the André Savine Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and full texts from the ongoing digitization of Savine Collection materials.