Special Collections: Russian & Soviet

The British Foreign Office Records of General Correspondence for Russia is the basic collection of documents for studying Anglo-Russian relations during this period of change in domestic and international affairs. This collection consists of the bound volumes of correspondence for the 1883 to1886 period.

The correspondence arriving in the Foreign Office was divided between "foreign" correspondence and "domestic" correspondence, which was further divided into notes from foreign representatives in London and notes from other British government departments, institutions, and individuals. Foreign correspondence was categorized by department (political, consular, commercial, etc.).

The video cassettes contained in this collection cover a wide range of subjects, including documentaries, news programs, musical performances and assorted Russian television programs. The content is either in Russian or in English but with Russian content.

The collection contains documents relating to the investigation into the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin (1862-1911), after having served as governor of the provinces of Grodno (1902) and Saratov (1903-1906), was appointed in April 1906 as Minister of the Interior and in July 1906 was named chairman of the Council of Ministers in which capacity he served until his assassination. He headed the Russian government at a time of massive protests by workers and peasants against the autocracy. Though firm in suppressing the protests and repressing revolutionary groups, he managed to introduce governmental, economic, and agrarian reforms aimed at improving conditions for farmers. Stolypin's policies irritated not only revolutionaries but many people in positions of power. After surviving several attempts on his life, Stolypin was shot by Dmitrii Bogrov, a leftist radical and agent of Okhrana, in Kiev on 14 September 1911, and died from his wounds four days later. The documents concern the course of the investigation, and the sentencing to death of Bogrov.

This collection presents an array of written materials from the Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography (AWRC), the proletarian organization established and maintained by leading Soviet filmmakers. The collection includes correspondence, memoranda, notes and minutes of meetings and the organization’s periodicals.

A collection of primers (about 50) published in the Indigenous languages of Russia.

The collection contains various periodicals, manuscripts and miscellaneous documents ranging from the 1960s to the early 1990s from the Soviet Union. The material was collected by Igor Belousovitch during his work for the Office of Analysis for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the U.S. State Department.

This collection provides a record of U.S. policy during the most prolonged U.S.-Soviet crisis of the Cold War era. It contains approximately 3000 documents from the Department of State and Department of Defense, primarily from November 1958 to the fall of 1962. Some of the topics covered in the collection are: U.S. policy toward Berlin and Germany in the years before the beginning of the crisis in 1958; alliance issues among the Unites States, Britain, France and West Germany; the U.S.-Soviet tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie, October 1961; the connection between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Crisis; and U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

The collection includes writings of leading scholars and specialists on the legal systems of the Soviet Union. It contains articles from periodicals and books. A number of titles are written by Harold T. Berman, a leading authority on comparative legal history, jurisprudence, Russian law, and international trade law.

This collection contains approximately 140,000 pages of documents from the Peter J. Braun Mennonite Archive, assembled in the Molochna Mennonite Settlement, Southern Ukraine, during the years of revolution and civil war from 1917 to 1920.  The extensive collection of Russian Mennonite sources covers subjects ranging from religious life, to economic development, to administrative practices from 1803 to 1920.

Card Catalog of Gubernskie, Oblastnye and Voiskovye Vedomosti from the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg.

The former Russian Historical Archive Abroad (RZIA) in Prague, Czech Republic, one of the most important institutions to Russian emigration collected books, periodicals and newspapers from emigre communities in the Soviet Union and around the world. There are 100,000 cards in this catalog with bibliographic descriptions and extensive notes.

This microfiche set is a facsimile of the card catalog of the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg. The catalog consists of the Manuscript Division (13 microfiche), the Book Division (33 microfiche), and the Printed Music Division (266 microfiche). The catalog contains cards for books on music from the 19th century to the middle 1990's such as biographies, histories of the theater, books on pedagogy, theory and other topics. In addition it covers music scores from the 18th century to the middle 1990's. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and other special collections items from the 19th and 20th centuries held by the Conservatory also have cards in this catalog.

This collection documents the plenums of the Central Committee of the CPSU from the Stalin era until the demise of the Soviet Union. During each plenum a team of stenographers compiled an "uncorrected stenogram" or verbatim transcript of the proceedings. However, speakers were permitted to revise and extend their remarks. These corrected versions, called the "author's copy," were then collated into the "corrected copy." After additional editing, usually with an eye to maintaining ideological consistency, the remarks were distributed to members of the Politburo, the CPSU Secretariat and members of the Central Committee as a final "edited copy." This publication contains nearly all versions - from uncorrected stenogram to edited copy - of Central Committee plenums. Of particular interest to scholars, the author's copies often contain the handwritten corrections of the participants as well as the inclusion of newly drafted remarks.

Commercial and Trade Relations Between Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the U.S., 1910-1963 is a primary source collection relating to the commercial and trade relations between Russia and the United States beginning in the Tsarist Russia period and extending through the Khrushchev period. It provides valuable information for longitudinal study of economic relations between Russia/the Soviet Union and the United States. Items consist mostly of instructions to and dispatches from diplomatic and consular officials, and cover treaties, general conditions affecting trade, imports and exports, laws and regulations, customs administration, tariffs, and ports of entry activities. Topics covered include the effect of the Bolshevik Revolution on Soviet-American trade, the activities of the Soviet purchasing office in the United States during the 1920s, U.S.-Soviet trade and debt negotiations that were part of the normalization of relations in 1933, the administration of Lend-Lease (extended to the Soviet Union in 1941), and the Soviet refusal of the U.S. offer of economic aid as proposed under the Marshall Plan. Of interest to scholars of economics, business history, international relations, Russian studies, Slavic studies, American studies, and history.

The collection contains 3,400 unique records of intelligence reports, diplomatic cables, political analysis, military situation reports, minutes of secret meetings, secret letters, oral histories, and closed-hearing testimony. These are unclassified and declassified government documents pertinent to important issues of U.S. defense, foreign intelligence and international policy.

The Declassified Documents Reference System provides online access to over 500,000 pages of previously classified United States government documents. Covering major international events from the Cold War to the Vietnam War and beyond, this single source enables users to locate key information underpinning studies in international relations, American studies, United States foreign and domestic policy studies, journalism and more. A wide range of documents is devoted to the Soviet Union, selected Soviet republics, and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. Highlights include U.S. intelligence reports on Ukrainian nationalists at the end of the Second World War as possible allies in case of a war with the Soviet Union; the Budapest Uprising of 1956; the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968; the Polish strikes and the Solidarnosc movement, etc.

The collection of declassified documents from Fond no. 5 of RGANI consists of documents from different sections of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which in the 1950s and 1960s supervised Party development work, ideology, propaganda, science, education, culture, and agriculture in the RSFSR and other Soviet republics. At different moments within this period, the structure and content of documents deposited in these Sections changed, while the structure of the Sections themselves were repeatedly reorganized, their names and functions changing, sectors or subdivisions within the continuously being created or abolished. As a rule, these changes were connected with the strivings of the Communist Party leadership to improve the structure of the Party and state administration, in order to optimize the functional tasks of the Party apparat. These efforts continued in later years as well; however, the period of Khrushchev's rule (1953-1964) was marked by the most frequent and radical (also far from always justified) structural transformations of the Central Committee apparat.

This collection allows researchers to trace in detail all these changes and to understand better how the Soviet system of administration operated in the post-Stalin period. Among the voluminous and diverse documents in the collection can be found drafts of resolutions of the Communist Party Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers; notations; letters; information; accounts; shorthand transcripts; manuscripts; memos from Sections and their subdivisions, local Party and soviet organs, ministries, departments, Soviet missions abroad, scientific and cultural institutions, scholarly institutions, individuals, and more.

The collection of declassified documents from Fond no. 5 of RGANI consists of documents from different sections of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which in the 1950s and 1960s supervised Party development work, ideology, propaganda, science, education, culture, and agriculture in the RSFSR and other Soviet republics. At different moments within this period, the structure and content of documents deposited in these Sections changed, while the structure of the Sections themselves were repeatedly reorganized, their names and functions changing, sectors or subdivisions within the continuously being created or abolished. As a rule, these changes were connected with the strivings of the Communist Party leadership to improve the structure of the Party and state administration, in order to optimize the functional tasks of the Party apparat. These efforts continued in later years as well; however, the period of Khrushchev's rule (1953-1964) was marked by the most frequent and radical (also far from always justified) structural transformations of the Central Committee apparat.

This collection allows researchers to trace in detail all these changes and to understand better how the Soviet system of administration operated in the post-Stalin period. Among the voluminous and diverse documents in the collection can be found drafts of resolutions of the Communist Party Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers; notations; letters; information; accounts; shorthand transcripts; manuscripts; memos from Sections and their subdivisions, local Party and soviet organs, ministries, departments, Soviet missions abroad, scientific and cultural institutions, scholarly institutions, individuals, and more.

The Digital National Security Archive contains more than 63,000 of the most important declassified documents regarding critical United States policy decisions. There are 29 complete collections, each offering specialized insights, for example: “Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962”; “Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962”; and “Soviet Estimate: U.S. Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991”, which is a document set of more than 600 U.S. intelligence estimates and assessments concerning the Soviet Union during the entire period of the Cold War.

The scrapbook of newspaper clippings and other material documents the treatment of Doukhobors in British Columbia, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. Also included in the collection are pamphlets about the Doukhobors in Canada, various petitions, and a PhD thesis on the experience of Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors in Canada by William Janzen.