16.04.2008
This Library resource is meant to showcase and supplement the growing number of sites that offer access to primary documents about Russian history and information on accessing archives in Russia. Your contributions and suggestions are welcome! Contact the author.
Color Code: Red links are to sites only in Russian.
Gray links have English available. What is "The Library?" Contact the primary author 1. Online Primary Document Sources report an error back to top KGBDocuments.eu offers decades of previously highly classified documents from the former KGB headquarters in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. They are now available online - with more planned to be available soon - in Russian and English. LiveJournal can be great resource for those who speak Russian an want to find out more about how today's (middle-class, well-educated) Russians live and how they feel about Soviet times. Kotoroy.net provides histories and photographs of landmarks in Russia that are no more. Communal Living in Russia has scores of photos, video and audio files, translated documents and essays, and more discussing the kommunalka, an important fixture of Soviet life. Annals of Communism is a project by Yale University to produce a new generation of scholarship about the USSR using newly available documents. Some primary texts and images have been made available free online while information on more books is also available. Marxist Writers Archive contains tons of material, including biographies of and whole books by writers such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Che Guevara, Georg Lukacs, Rosa Luxemburg, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many, many more. ColdWarFiles.org provides access to translated documents, many recently declassified, that pertain to the Cold War. The Cold War International History Project is a contributor to ColdWarFiles.org and has many other documents available on its own site. Stalinka is a scholarly-referenced collection of more than 500 images comprising representations of Stalin in various genres. This resource will be invaluable to anyone researching Stalin, the cult of personality that surrounded him, or Soviet propaganda. The Harvard Project presents mostly interviews with Soviet refugees to the States - information on cultural, social, and economic conditions in the USSR in the early years of the Cold War. Electronic Library of Russian Literature and Folklore is a very good resource for those subjects. Folk.ru provides oral history and modern folklore from Russia. The Ukrainian Folklore Project is an interesting site sponsored by the University of Alberta. Lots of info, pics, video footage and other multimedia presentations. The Ukrainian Museum Archives offers lots of "online exhibits" of artifacts from Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian immigrant culture. Gromoty.ru contains not only photographs, "prorisi" and translations of all published Novgorod birchbark letters, including recently excavated ones, but also historical, archaeological, bibliographic and linguistic comments on almost every one of them. Obshezhitie.net is a site for those interested in early Russian manuscripts. Anna.Ahmatova.Com offers biographical info on the poet and recordings of her reading her own poems. RussianArchives.com offers many images, movies, and recordings - for a price. 2. Sources for Statistics and Other Info report an error back to top Sova Center offers lots of information on democracy, xenophobia, antisemitism, and other civil-society issues in Russia. Site is entirely in Russian. Unicef offers a page of stats - mostly from 2005 and earlier on issues of nutrition, education, and more in Russia. The United Nations published its human development index on Russia in 2006. It has lots of stats on everything from life span to literacy. (Though they are mostly official stats from the RF.) The Red Book is a very extensive list of Russian ethnic minorities, with information about their location, history, etc. Consistency Lists provide massive lists of Russian names, from those of historical figures to current institutions. Meant to provide consistency to transliteration and spelling, these are also handy to checking place names and dates. Victims of Political Terror in the USSR is a vast list provided by the Russian NGO Memorial. Bibliographic Database of Linguistics provides bibliographical references to scholarly publications on all branches of linguistics and all the languages of the world, with the emphasis on non-Indo-European languages and lesser known Indo-European languages. 3. Library and Archival Services report an error back to top
Research in Russia without leaving home! Russian Courier is a copy service serving the Russian State Library, Russia's largest depository of books and research materials. They will make scans of documents you may need and email them to you. Their services are reasonably priced and highly recommended! The Russian National Library also now has an in-house copy/scan service. Most of the directions are currently in Russian and are not so easy to follow, but if you can get through them, the dollar-a-page price tag is quite reasonable and the quality of the scans is very good. The Slavic and East European Library runs a free online service to help those researchers (yes, even students) of FSU-related subjects obtain materials related to their research topic. They also have an impressive list of links based on subject to help you find information. Slavistik Portal offers a library search engine that searches several collections around the world to find what you need. You can order copies of the material on-line in most cases. 4. Guides to Russian Archives report an error back to top
Before traveling abroad to research, plan ahead with the help of these sites! ArcheoBiblioBase is an English-language site with lots on Russian archives and requirements for performing research in them. Fuller information can be found, in Russian, at RusArchives.ru. EastView.com is an excellent (pay) source for books and periodicals about Russia and the CIS. See also their "Guidebook to Russian Archives," an index of what's available where! SRAS can help you get into Russian archives, find translators, etc. Contact us for more info. Professor Mark Steinberg has written a very helpful guide as well based on his own experiences researching in Russia. Archives of Russia is a massive three volume "directory and bibliographic guide to holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg." It retails for around 200-300 USD, but most researchers agree it is well worth the cost. Archives in America - A considerable list of Soviet document collections housed in America. 5. Field Notes from Russian Archives report an error back to top
The following notes are meant to supplement the information that can be found via the sources available above. If you have had experience researching abroad in Russia and would like to contribute to these field notes, please contact us! General Notes
In all Russian archives, researchers must obtain a propusk from the archive's administration in order to perform research there. All archives require an official letter, usually from the researcher's affiliated educational institution. You may download an example letter from the SRAS site, but make sure you look below for additional requirements that may need to be inserted into this letter. Also, please note that the example letter is designed for historians, who are the most common researchers abroad. It can be adapted, of course, to meet the needs of sociologists, anthropologists, etc. who ware also interested in research abroad. Most researchers write their own letters and have their professors sign them. Most archives have an official "putivoditel" which describe the various "fonds" they store. A fond usually represents documents from an entire government agency or at department within that agency. "Opisi" are subsections of fonds, often separated by subject. Individual files within the opisi are known as "dela" (delo in singular). Citations to documents found in archives should list the archive, the fond, the opisi, the dela and then the page number (known as a "list.") and should look something like this: RGASPI f. 16, op. 2, d. 16, l. 45. Try to network as much as possible while abroad and doing research. No matter how obscure you may think your research is, there is likely a couple of other researchers looking into similar issues, particularly if you are in a major city like Moscow or St. Pete. Each new person you meet will make your life easier by an order of magnitude. Think seriously about how much time you'll need to complete your research, and be sure to account for how much time you'll need to acclimate to everyday life in Russia and the contingencies that you'll encounter. You can still accomplish a significant amount of study on limited budget of time and resources, but it is nearly impossible to do so without help. You should also be aware that archives keep "sanitary days" - one day a month, the archive will close for cleaning. Info submitted: 8/25/07 by Brian Horne, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago.
Info Updated: 9/30/07 by Jennifer Amos, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago. AVP
Full Name: Архив внешней политики
English Translation: Foreign Affairs Archive
Info submitted: 9/30/07 by Jennifer Amos, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago. Documents needed to get propusk: Letter from your university, letter from a Russian institution, if you can find more letters attesting to you and your greatness, please bring them. You will also need a cover letter describing, in detail, your project and what type of documents you would like to see. These types of documents must be bullet-pointed. Do not forget the bullet-points; letters without bullet points may be considered invalid. Also, in your cover letter, indicate and underline a fax number where your acceptance can be faxed. Otherwise, the MID archivists will choose one at random from the letterhead of one of the multiple letters you submitted.
Time to get propusk: 3 months Prep beforehand: If possible, send these documents or fax them. The putivoditel is quite difficult to get a hold of even within the archive. Time between request of delo and receipt: varies from 1 week to 1 month.
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: if you find out a maximum, let us know! Problems: The putivoditel is not accessible by mere mortals. Even if you get the putivoditel, you cannot request material through the putivoditel. The archivist who reads your project description and document request will decide what you do and do not receive. This means be as clear, thorough, and explicit as possible in your letter. However, if you are too explicit, they will not give you files they believe will be outside your scope. However, if you are not explicit enough, they will reject the application. You will need to find a happy medium - and give yourself lots of time to find that happy medium. Laptops are not allowed. Security is tight. GARF
Full Name: Государственный архив Российской Федерации
English Translation: State Archive of the Russian Federation
Info submitted: 9/30/07 by Jennifer Amos, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago. Documents needed to get a propusk: Letter from anyone, passport. (Seriously, this is the easiest one to get into. You can write your own letter and they'll even supply the paper.)
Time to get propusk: 20 minutes Prep beforehand: GARF's putivoditel are available at many libraries and are usually for sale rather affordably at the RGASPI bookstore. Therefore, I knew the fonds I was interested in. Working days between requesting delo and receipt: 3
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: 10 Problems: GARF gets busy at times and it is not unusual when very busy for seats to run out. During those times (July in my experience), it is best to be there within 5 minutes of its opening. GARF also is undergoing remont, which means that for the next couple months nothing is available there. The bathrooms near the reading room are absolutely foul. GKTsMVV
Full Name: Государственный культурный центр-музей (ГКЦМ) В.С. Высоцкого
English Translation: State Cultural Center-Museum of V. C. Vysotsky.
Info submitted: 8/25/07 by Brian Horne, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago. Documents needed to get a proposk: Letter from your university, passport.
Time to get propusk: 2-3 weeks Prep beforehand: putivoditel (with documents and recordings) is available from the archivists. Working days between requesting delo and receipt: usually less than one.
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: if you find out a maximum, let us know! Problems: The archives are only open on Wednesdays, so allot yourself enough Wednesdays to get done what you need to get done. The archivists are remarkably helpful - they talked with me about my project and helped me to find materials related to my project. However, photocopying is not permitted so be prepared to take lots of notes. Laptops are permitted here. RGASPI
Full Name: Российский государственный архив социально-политической истории
English Translation: Russian State Archive of Social-Political History
Info submitted: 9/30/07 by Jennifer Amos, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago. Documents needed to get a propusk: Letter from university, your passport (w/registration).
Time to get propusk: 1 hour Prep beforehand: RGASPI's putivoditel is available in the RGASPI bookstore. That said, the reading room archivist, Misha, will insist that he knows what you need to see. He will then hand you the opisi for those dela that he deems you need. Regardless of whether or not he is right, humor him for a couple hours. Otherwise, your life will be miserable in these archives. Working days between requesting delo and receipt: a few.
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: if you find out a maximum, let us know! Problems: A large portion of the material is in microfilm. However, there are 20 microfilm readers and only four have both light bulbs and focus. If you get there late and have microfilm, you might as well go home. The first time you go, look where people are sitting in the microfilm room. This will help you figure out which readers are the good ones. Also, the head archivist in the reading room yells at everyone. Don't take it personally. Lastly, there are also only so many desks that have power outlets, so if you've written material and a laptop, you will either want to a) get there early and/or b) bring paper in case you cannot plug in. RGANI
Full Name: Российский государственный архив новейшей истории
English Translation: Russian Government Archive of Contemporary History
Info submitted: 9/30/07 by Jennifer Amos, PhD Candidate, History, University of Chicago. Documents needed to get a propusk: Letter from your university, your passport. (RGANI will not accept a copy of the passport and a spravka if you are being registered. You will have to wait until you can present your original passport.)
Time to get propusk: 1-2 weeks Prep beforehand: RGANI does not have a published putivoditel. When you get there, they will hand you a notebook. The notebook is annoyingly vague. Working days between requesting delo and receipt: usually less than one.
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: if you find out a maximum, let us know! Problems: RGASPI has somewhat tight security as the building houses many other government offices. You will not be able to bring a laptop. Also do not attempt to bring an ipod, camera, anything like this. You will have to be greeted at the door by the archivist, who will personally escort you to the archive. RGB
Full Name: Российская государственная библиотека
English Translation: Russian State Library; Also known as the Lenin Library.
Info entered: 3/11/08 Documents needed to get a propusk: Passport and a fee of 100RUR.
Time to get propusk: 20 minutes
Other: as this library is quite popular, you will be assigned a reading room which is indicated in the blue box of your library card. To access material on military, legal, music, and other "special collections," you will need to go to a separate reading room - ask at the desk as you are applying for you proposk where material on your subject is located. If you will need access to rare books and documents, you will also need to submit a formal letter in Russian stating your research topic. Prep beforehand: RGB's putivoditel are available online in Russian. They are also available on public computers on the first floor. To request materials, you must fill out a form at the desk located outside your assigned reading room. Working days between requesting delo and receipt: .5 (request in the morning, receive in afternoon)
Maximum delo that can be requested at one time: 10 Problems, minutia: No printed material may enter the library - including dictionaries. You can bring a laptop, however, as well as pens and paper. Electrical outlets are hard to come by. There is a small and comfortable cafe in the basement.
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