Russian & Soviet History

The Collective "The Bridge: Connecting Past and Present Through Archival Research on Russia" has been very active since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has become an important resource for researchers interested in archival research related to Russia.

Following the group on Facebook, or Twitter (@TBridgeResearch) can be a good way of keeping up with developments in access to these materials.

There is another facebook group that some scholars are using to arrange to have people resident in the Russian Federation make trips to archives on their behalf: Сходи за меня в архив.

Using Archives and Libraries in the Former Soviet Union

Some very valuable documents and archival collections related to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, documents and collections largely relayed by émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union, are held by a number of North American research institutions. The following are some of the North American repositories of these types of documents.

The Hoover Institution The Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

UC Berkeley The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Berkeley's primary rare books and manuscripts repository.

Princeton University Library Special Collections Princeton's division of Special Collections is particularly rich in documents related to the Cold War and U.S.-Soviet relations and diplomacy. Princeton also houses important literary or humanities collections such as the the papers of the Soviet-era poet Osip Mandelshtam and the papers of religious philosopher Georges Florovsky.

Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library is home to the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture, which contains a great many manuscript collections bearing witness to different aspects of Russian and East European émigration.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a number of important archival collections of Russian émigré figures.

New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts The New York Public Library has rich collections of unique materials related to both Pre-Revolutionary Russia and Soviet Russia.

Library of Congress, Manuscripts The Library of Congress houses many archival collections related to Russian émigré figures.

The Stalin Digital Archive The SDA is a result of collaboration between the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and Yale University Press (YUP) to create an electronic database of finding aids, to digitize documents and images, and to publish in different forms and media materials from the recently declassified Stalin archive in the holdings of RGASPI.

Microform. Some institutions in North America hold copies of CPSU archival fonds, generally in microform. Princeton has a microform copy of Fond 89 - a collection of CPSU documents declassified in the late 1990's. More voluminous holdings of CPSU documents are held in the collections of the Hoover Institute, Yale, Harvard and the Library of Congress. To identify and locate these holdings most efficiently, access WorldCat, access the "advanced search" interface, choose "Accession number" from the dropdown next to the top-line search field, and enter the following number: 34943469