Research Guides: Soviet history: archival resources at Harvard university library and archives: Home

Introduction

This guide contains a list of Harvard-owned archival materials documenting the history of the Soviet Union.It is intended as a companion to Soviet History: a Bibliographic Guide to Published Sources, which deals with published, rather than archival, materials.

The guide is arranged chronologically and by topic/provenance.

The primary sources for the study of the Soviet history available to Harvard researchers vary in scope and format. Many materials listed are microform copies of archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other government organizations. The originals of these documents reside in Russian and other archives around the world. Materials on microform are generally found at Lamont Library. They can be viewed using the microform readers/scanners at the Lamont Media Lab on Level B.

There is also a substantial number of personal manuscript collections, including the papers of Leon Trotsky and other Revolutionary leaders as well as the papers of numerous Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov. Manuscript collections are held in Houghton Library in hard copy.

Several visual, microform, and ephemera collections are held at Widener and Fung Libraries.

A number of resources are available in electronic format, either exclusively (like the Stalin Digital Archive) or along with the original paper documents (like the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System or some ephemera collections). For a detailed list of e-resources in Slavic studies please visit the E-resources page of the Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Harvard : Library and Archival Resources LibGuide.

While some materials are housed on-site, others are held off-site and must be requested in advance. Please consult each collection’s HOLLIS record (via provided hyperlink) for information on access and instructions for requesting items.