Special Collections:

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.

Catalog to the Slavonic Library of the National Library of the Czech Republic.

This collection documents the history of the Charter 77 human rights group.  It includes more than 500 reports by VONS (Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted), and many samizdat writings, including periodicals issued by members of Charter 77 and other individuals.

Letter from V. H. Vulchanov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, regarding his son who left an airplane in Gander, Newfoundland in 1990 and asked for asylum in Canada.

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 Library of Congress Cyrillic Catalogue is one of the most important bibliographic tools in Slavic area studies. It consists of the monographs and serials holdings in the Library of Congress in Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian, along with other titles reported by 185 American libraries. This includes major parts of collections at the New York Public Library, the Hoover Library and the libraries of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. All entries are transliterated into the Roman alphabet using the Library of Congress transliteration system.

The collection includes approximately 150,000 articles on some 100,000 individuals who lived and worked within the borders of the region known today as the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These individuals influenced the development of politics, economics, religion, art and culture in the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia from the 8th century through all periods of Middle European history up to the present.

Manuscript collection: This is a collection consisting of news clippings, typescripts, Radio Free Europe reports and analyses, special issues of newspapers printed during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and various ephemera, all of which were used by Professor H. Gordon Skilling as source material for his book Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1976).

Book collection: This includes books in Czech, English, French, German, Russian and Slovak; the major intellectual, literary, and political journals and newspapers of the country; and official documents.  It also contains Professor Skilling’s published materials, including books, pamphlets, journals and runs of the most important Czech and Slovak newspapers, as well as 1968 issues of Pravda (Moscow) concerning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

This  collection of reports on politics and military affairs, statistics, interviews, meeting minutes, court proceedings and diplomatic cables, documents the creation of the Third Republic. The Third Republic was established after World War II as a compromise between pre-war Czechoslovak Republic leaders and the Czech Communist Party (KSC).

A collection of books assembled and donated by Professor H.G. Skilling and others on Czechoslovakia from the early 1930s to the early 1960s, tracing the country’s history from independence to the Communist takeover after World War II. The main focus is on the First Republic and the period of Communist rule. Skilling was a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University from 1959 to 1980.

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.

A collection of 33 drawings depicting Ukrainian refugees in Displaced Persons camps following the Second World War.

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 KARTA Center was founded in Warsaw in 1982 and serves as the archive of record for documenting the history of opposition and dissent in post-World War II Poland. The three archives included in this collection include the Solidarity movement archive, the Eastern archive, and the Opposition archive. The material covers the formation and activity of the Independent Autonomous Trade Union (Solidarnosc) as well as materials on other independent community, social and political groups. There are also memoirs, diaries and reminiscences of those who witnessed firsthand the life in the Eastern borderlands during the Second Polish Republic, the fate of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union and under the Soviet occupation and their displacement after World War II, as well as personal documents relating to everyday life in the People's Republic of Poland between 1944 and 1990.

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.