Research Guides: HIST 038: Russia in the 20th Century (SC): Primary Sources Available Online

Online Primary Sources (Russian and Soviet History)

EuroDocs : Russia : Soviet Union History
This website offers an extensive list of annotated links to primary source collections. Find primary source documents dating from 1917-1991.

Best practice: if you're looking for documents related to something particular (e.g. Trotsky, famine, The Winter War), use CTRL+F to search within the EuroDocs links.
Stalinka: Digital Library of Staliniana
This digital collection comprises visual materials and artifacts relating to Stalin: photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, etc.
Revelations from the Russian Archives
This Library of Congress exhibit presented documents, photographs, and films from the highly secret internal record of Soviet Communist rule for the first time in a public venue. You can view and study digital versions of these documents.

To view scans and photographs of documents, click on the section links "Internal Workings of the Soviet System" and "The Soviet Union and the United States."

You can browse available documents by categories such as The Gulag, Collectivization and Industrialization, Anti-religious Campaigns, and
Attacks on Intelligentsia.
The Chairman Smiles
Online exhibit from the International Institute of Social History featuring images of Soviet political posters.

Europeana This link opens in a new window
Europeana provides access to digital books, art work, photographs, newspapers, films and other cultural objects from European museums, galleries, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.

Europeana includes a lot of primary source materials pertaining to 20th century Russian history, but given the large size of the collection, it's a good idea to search for a topic rather than try to browse for sources.

Eastern European and Slavic Studies Collection (University of Wisconsin)
The "Eastern European and Slavic Studies Collection" at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, "brings together, in digital form, primary and secondary materials relating to the study of this region including its history, literature, language, political science and more."

(includes some sources in English, others in Russian)
European Memories of the Gulag
An international team of researchers has collected 160 statements from former deportees, photographs of their lives, documents from private and public archives and films. The website provides short interviews in the original language of former Gulag deportees (with transcriptions in French, English, Polish, or Russian) as well as some photos and videos from the period under consideration. (1939 to 1953)
Soviet Posters (Swarthmore Peace Collection)
The Swarthmore College Peace Collection has over 150 propaganda posters from the early years of the Soviet Union (1920s-1930s). These posters have been digitized and the images placed in a database with information about each poster. The text included in some of the posters has been translated into English.

Expanding Your Search

Try searching for a specific person or organization

You can often find primary source documents if you know the person or organization you're interested in. Start your search in Tripod and the sites listed here, but if that doesn't work, expand it to Google. Try using some of the document types (e.g. personal narratives, correspondence) as additional keywords in your Google search. Hopefully, you will find primary source documents that have been scanned by other libraries and made available online.

Need to identify specific people and/or organizations? Look at the Overviews page for suggestions. (Reference books tend to be useful for this purpose.)