Introduction

This chapter covers an enormous, and ethnically and linguistically diverse, geographical area. What is commonly referred to as Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies encompasses well over 100 languages and geo-political entities. The Russian Federation alone includes 35 officially recognized minority languages, and over 100 spoken on its territory—from Adegey to Yakut. Given the vastness of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian area, the Handbook includes three chapters in Section One covering the countries in this region. The Central and Eastern Europe chapter covers the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Belarus and Ukraine (East Slavic countries); the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia (West Slavic), and Hungary. The Southeastern Europe chapter covers Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and the areas comprising the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia). And the focus of this current chapter is on Russia and the extra-European parts of the former Soviet territories: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Given its close historical and cultural ties to Russia and the former Soviet Union, Mongolia is covered here as well.

Because its political, cultural, and intellectual hegemony in the region has historically been reflected in the region’s representation in North American research collections, Russia will be given considerably more space than any of the other nine countries in the region. It should be noted that there are growing efforts in the North American research library community to redress this and to better represent the political, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. These efforts, however, must inevitably contend with challenges associated with resource description and scarcity of language and regional expertise.

The Academic Field

Like all area studies constructs, Russian and Eurasian Studies is, at least in theory, a pandisciplinary category. It is often grouped with Eastern and Central European countries in academic area studies programs, such as Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Slavic and East European Studies; or Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In practice, Russian and Eurasian Studies was long a considerably narrower field, both disciplinarily and geographically, than the label implies. Disciplinarily, it was distributed across three main clusters: humanities, history, and politics. The core of the humanities cluster was the study of literature, cinema, performing arts, art, and architecture; the historical cluster engaged the social, political, cultural, and intellectual history of the region; and the political cluster examined the contemporary state administration in the region and its foreign and domestic politics. Imperial Russia long dominated the study of the 19^th century in Eastern Europe (present-day Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus) and of what would become the extra-European territories of the Soviet Union, with Russian literary and cultural canons dominating in the humanities, and Imperial Russia’s internal and external politics and its social and cultural evolutions dominating historical research and teaching on the area. This was true as well for the study of the region’s 20^th-century history, dominated as the region was for a full seven decades of that century by the Soviet Union, with Russian as the language of political administration and also the intellectual and cultural lingua franca of the region as a whole.

In the early 21^st century, however, several factors have helped to significantly diversify North American research and teaching focused on Russian and Eurasian Studies. There has been, for example, a turn towards decanonization in the humanities—an expansion of the scope of humanities research and teaching focused on the region beyond the literary, art-historical, and musical canons, to include broader cultural and aesthetic systems outside those canons. In history, there has been movement away from a focus on larger state apparatuses and state and cultural institutions towards the reconstruction of the texture of daily life and the realities and experiences of people of all stations and in all parts of the region, towards the redressing of what have come to be referred to in contemporary academic parlance as “archival silences,” and towards the kinds of events, phenomena, and experience that have historically tended to elude the historical record.

In recent study of the region, there has also been increased representation of anthropology and sociology and other social science disciplines. The central turn here is toward interdisciplinarity. Increasingly, humanities, history, and social science projects in Russian and Eurasian Studies are borrowing each other’s methods and primary source bases in classes and research projects that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.

All of this has resulted in expanding appetites for an ever-broadening range of documentary and artifactual categories in a wide range of media, including artifacts of popular and material culture, analog audiovisual recordings, and born-digital documents and artifacts. A shift of focus from hegemonic centers to peripheries, and efforts to access experiences, expressions, and communications marginalized or excluded in the historical record, have created greater demand for regional publications with small print runs and for documents in languages that were marginalized in the Soviet period or by Imperial or post-Soviet Russian dominance in the region.

Per the Enrollment Database of the Modern Language Association (MLA), US Russian-language enrollment in 2016 was 20,353 (MLA Language Enrollment Database, n.d.). The Central Asian and Caucasian languages of the region are not programatically taught in North America; students requiring instruction in these languages for specific projects engage in independent language study. Some institutions have structures in place to match students with tutors for individual instruction. Russian language, literature, and culture are taught in Slavic Language and Literature departments in institutions that have them. In some places, Russian and German are paired in one department; otherwise, world languages and comparative literature departments tend to be the administrative homes for Russian language and humanistic study. Any humanistic study of the other countries covered by this chapter tends to happen within Near Eastern studies departments and programs. Historical and social-scientific study of the region occurs in the relevant disciplinary departments.

The primary professional organizations for Russian and Eurasian studies are:

• The Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
• The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL)
• The Middle Eastern Studies Association

The most important email lists and scholarly networks for the field are:

• SEELANGS: Slavic and East European languages and literatures
• H-EarlySlavic: pre-1725 Slavic history, literature, and culture
• H-Russia: Russian and Soviet history
• H-SHERA: history of East European, Eurasian and Russian art and architecture

Publishing Landscape

Russia is sometimes described as a graphomaniacal society. The country has several thousand publishers, and its publishing output is massive. Its population of approximately 144 million has produced, on average, around 115,000 monographic print titles annually over the past 15 years (Russian Book Chamber, n.d.). The country’s production of periodicals is similarly vast. While the bulk of these publications falls outside more traditional definitions of the academic-library purview, recent trends of decanonization and interdisciplinarity make it increasingly difficult to exclude such non-traditional categories. For this reason, many of the larger academic libraries which collect Russia’s print output have formed cooperative collection development arrangements in recent years to create maximally comprehensive shared inter-institutional print collections.

Literature—belles lettres as well as intellectual and philosophical writings—has been an essential element of Russia’s national culture and society since the early 19^th century. An unusually high quotient of the population publishes works of poetry and prose, including memoiristic works. A very small number of publishers publish only poetry and creative prose likely to be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Russian literature. In general, the publishing landscape is a shifting one, and this content category is something of a moving target; it is thus advisable to rely on vendors’ conversance with the publishing sphere. Some librarians may also instruct approval plan vendors to select works awarded major literary prizes and by prize-winning authors. The volume of belletristic literature coming out of the Caucasus and former Soviet Central Asia is much smaller than that produced in Russia, but these countries are active in this area and recent years have seen revivals of national languages and local literary traditions. Because this tends to be less charted territory than the Russian literary sphere, vendor expertise is crucial for collecting this material.

Local history (in Russian, kraevedenie or краеведение) is another prodigious genre in Russia, with its own range of subgenres—from well-documented and methodologically rigorous works of narrowly restricted geographical focus, to books that are essentially collections of anecdotal accounts, to publications filled with minute details about the histories and personnel of various local institutions. While, for other world regions, personal reminiscences of historically anonymous people and amateur histories of small areas are generally considered beyond the scope of research libraries, in this case the peculiarities of Russia’s 20^th-century history make these publications a uniquely valuable source category. For most of the 20^th century, Russia had a state monopoly on publishing and a range of censorship mechanisms that substantially regulated and restricted literary and artistic expression, philosophical and intellectual thought in many disciplines, and, especially, any historical works focused on Russia or other parts of the Soviet Union. This censorship of the Soviet historical narrative lends a special importance to anecdotal local histories and memoirs of historically inconsequential figures. Access to such materials can be critical for scholarly projects seeking to redress gaps or silences in the existing Soviet historical record. The same can be said of histories and memoirs that have been emerging from the former Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia, sometimes in Caucasian and Central Asian national languages that were relegated to the category of minor local vernaculars for much of the Soviet period. There have been recent indications that the current administration in Russia wants to assert more control over historical narratives of the Soviet era, but as of the time of writing, the publishing of history has not been restricted in any systematic way in the post-Soviet era.

Academic publishing across the disciplines is prolific in Russia, and occurs on a somewhat smaller scale across former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, with Kazakhstan and Georgia the biggest producers. For Kazakhstan, approximately 75% of the output is in Russian, with the rest in Kazakh; in Georgia, the proportions are reversed, with 75% in the Georgian language and the remainder in Russian or English, roughly speaking. Many librarians responsible for this region tend to collect only the part of the region’s humanities and social-science output that is focused on the region itself, and forgo more general works or works focused on other regions. Historically, even the largest North American libraries have not tried to systematically cover the region’s voluminous practitioner literature (e.g., legal literature for practicing lawyers) or publications in the natural sciences.

eBook platforms for the region’s output (at this point, almost exclusively Russian) available to North American institutions are a recent development; print is still the primary medium.

Across disciplines, academic publications focused on Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus are another prodigious category, with monographs from most, if not all, of the major academic presses for humanities and social sciences in the US and UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. The same is true for the major publishers of academic literature in Western Europe. At this point, scholarship focused on Russia and Eurasia is broad and interdisciplinary enough that individual publishers and monographic series are not productive as parameters for surveying the literature. The periodical literature is similarly voluminous, with numerous interdisciplinary and disciplinarily specific periodical titles focused on the region, and articles appearing in other disciplinary and interdisciplinary periodicals of more global geographic scope.

Collection Development Tools

EBSCO’s GOBI Library Solutions and ProQuest’s OASIS, both of which offer approval plans and firm ordering, provide good coverage for English-language publications focused on Russia and Eurasia. For librarians interested in literature and history, these Library of Congress Classification (LCC) ranges should be sufficient for defining the scope of approval plans and notification lists for firm ordering:

• PG (Slavic Languages and Literatures)
• PK 8001-8832 (Armenian Language and Literature)
• PK 9001-9201 (Caucasian Languages)
• PL 1-481 (Ural-Altaic Languages)
• DK 1-949.5 (covers the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, including all former Soviet republics)

LC call number ranges are not practical as parameters for targeting material focused on this region in other disciplines. Here, use of terms such as “Russia” and “Former Soviet Union” in GOBI’s controlled “geographic focus” field is recommended in addition to the LCC ranges for language/literature and history. Notification interfaces that list LC Cataloging in Publication records can be handy for identifying not-yet-published titles a librarian may want to acquire.

For publications issued from outside North America and the UK and focused on Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus, it’s generally best to work with local vendors, whether on an approval-plan or firm-order basis. The following vendors can supply publications in non-English Western European languages focused on the history, literature, culture, politics, sociology, economics, and so on of Russia and other former Soviet territories:

• Casalini Libri in Italy, a supplier of French, Greek, Italian, and Spanish materials
• Amalivre in France, a supplier of French-language materials from France and other francophone countries
• Harrassowitz in Germany, a supplier of German, Dutch, Finnish, and Scandinavian materials

It should be noted that German, in particular, is an important language in historical and literary scholarship focused on Russia and the Soviet Union. Libraries aiming at comprehensiveness in Russian and Eurasian studies may want to consider including German publications.

For material from the region itself, intermediary vendors are indispensable, and approval plans are highly advisable for even smaller-scale collection agendas. As the publishing landscape is vast and unstable in Russia and not well charted for the former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, North American librarians responsible for these regions should rely on vendors who not only have deep and extensive regional expertise and maintain close familiarity with the regional publishers and their output, but also have experience mediating between the evolving purviews of North American academic and research libraries and the shifting sands of the publishing landscape in the region. Fortunately, several active vendors fit this description. Listed here in alphabetical order are four major vendors covering Russia and/or former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus for academic libraries in North America. All four are incorporated in the US or Western Europe, offer approval plans and service firm orders, and regularly circulate lists of new titles.

• ATC Books International is an excellent vendor for print publications from Armenia and Central Asia, offering approval plans and firm ordering.
• East View Information Services runs the largest operation supplying research-valuable material from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the other territories of the former Soviet Union. The company offers coverage of the region in its entirety, and will configure selective coverage of specific countries/languages as needed. In addition to supplying print publications from the region, East View is also the largest commercial database publisher for born-digital and digitized scholarly and journalistic content coming out of the region (more on this in the next section on Disciplinary Resources). East View uses spreadsheet-based templates for print approval plans, with one sheet that covers parameters such as price limits, geography, languages, and another covering disciplinary and thematic parameters using a numeric classification system modified from the structure of the Russian National Bibliography (RNB). Full cataloging services with approval plans for materials in Russian and some other languages, as well as customizable recent-publication lists, are also available. East View also offers eBook approval plans (the books are served on the company’s own proprietary platform) and approval plans for the region’s cinematic output (feature and documentary, contemporary and retrospective) in DVD format.
• Natasha Kozmenko Booksellers Slavic Literature focuses almost exclusively on Russia. While they will supply material from other Russian regions, they are strongest in the output of Russia’s two largest publishing centers: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Their expertise in these two markets is deep and extensive, and their strong relationships with publishers allows them to provide elusive small-print-run titles for approval plan customers. Instead of structured templates for approval plan profiles, Natasha Kozmenko uses text documents that verbally define the parameters of material to be supplied. Optional paid full cataloging and shelf-ready services for its approval plans are available.
• MIPP International covers the print output of all of the former Soviet territories, including but not limited to Russia, the former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Their main base in the region is in Minsk, and, in addition to Belarus and Moldova, they are particularly strong in the Russian regions beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg (i.e., the eight Federal Districts: Central, Northwestern, Southern, North-Caucasus, Volga, Ural, Siberian, and Far Eastern). MIPP is currently developing capacity for full cataloging services.

The following are active rare, antiquarian, and out-of-print dealers who specialize in Russia and, in some cases, other territories of the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Bloc, and who are active suppliers of North American research libraries.

• Penka Rare Books, based in Berlin, is very active and deeply expert in the antiquarian Russian and East European book trade. They regularly publish lists of antiquarian and rare offerings from the region, and are resourceful when it comes to sourcing out-of-print titles in general.
• Globus Books, in San Francisco, is the American arm of the Moscow and Tbilisi-based dealer Bookvica Russian Antiquarian Books. It is very active and deeply expert in the antiquarian trade in books from Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus, with a particular strength in Georgia. Globus Books publishes catalogs several times per year, and is a good resource for sourcing out-of-print titles from Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
• Esterum broadly covers the contemporary belletristic and scholarly Russian-language press, and circulates weekly lists of new publications. It is well connected to a number of smaller presses and to many authors, and often has advanced knowledge of very small print-run publications, some of which never enter established distribution channels. This gives the company the ability to reserve copies of these often elusive publications for interested customers. Esterum can thus be used to supplement larger approval plans for libraries that aim for comprehensiveness.

Other antiquarian dealers who regularly offer materials from the region include Simon Beattie Bookseller in the UK, Michael Fagan Fine Art & Rare Books (mfaganfineart@gmail.com), Productive Arts!, and Michael R. Weintraub (michael@mrwbooks.com).

Book Fairs

The largest book fairs of interest to academic libraries are the Moscow International Book Fair and the NonFiction Book Fair, both held annually in Moscow. All large-scale Russian publishers of belles lettres, art books, and scholarly literature in the humanities, history, and the social sciences have booths at these fairs, and books from many smaller publishers are displayed in a separate area at the NonFiction fair. The major Russian approval plan vendors visit these fairs to acquire stock and discover new publishers. For approval plan customers, the fairs can be a good opportunity to gauge the extent to which their vendors are covering the categories of the Russian print publishing arena targeted by approval-plan profiles. The fairs also provide an opportunity to discover new categories to be added to profiles.

The Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair features many of the major publishers of belletristic and humanities literature, but places heavier emphasis than the NonFiction fair on smaller, independent publishers. It can provide a good supplement to information supplied by vendors about smaller independent publishers.

Currently, there are no fairs that concentrate specifically on publishing from the post-Soviet Central Asian and Caucasian regions.

Another way to assess collecting related to Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus is to use OCLC WorldShare^® Collection Evaluation, which provides benchmarking and a variety of ways to parse and examine comparative data on collections at different OCLC subscriber institutions. It should be noted that many libraries have significant cataloging backlogs of materials from Russia and Eurasia, which can complicate meaningful comparison via OCLC holdings data.

Disciplinary Resources

Journals

The most visible and impactful English-language interdisciplinary titles for Russian and Eurasian studies are listed below in order of importance:

• Slavic Review (0037-6779, 2325-7784)
• Russian Review (0036-0341, 1467-9434)
• Slavic & East European Journal (0037-6752, 2325-7687)
• Canadian-American Slavic Studies (0090-8290, 2210-2396)
• Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space (2166-4072)
• Ararat: Quarterly Journal of Armenian Literature, History and the Arts (0003-7583)
• Central Asian Affairs (2214-2282)
• Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization (1074-6846)
• Post-Soviet Affairs (1060-586X)
• Russian Literature (0304-3487)
• Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (1750-3132)
• Toronto Slavic Quarterly (1708-3885)
• Post-Communist Economies (1465-3958)
• Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia (1558-092X)

Although far too many to note here, numerous scholarly periodical titles focusing on Eastern Europe, Russia, and the rest of the former Soviet Union, in a broad range of disciplines, are published by Western publishers. For additional titles, see this useful list of Journals in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies published by Slavic Review.

Primary and Secondary Source Databases

• East View Information Services’ Universal Databases: Aggregators of born-digital and digitized primary sources in different categories, such as “Russian Central Newspapers,” “Regional Newspapers,” “Newspapers of the North Caucasus, Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” and “Periodicals of Central Asia and the Caucasus.” Other categories aggregate the contents of several Russian journals in history, the humanities, and the social sciences, such as “Moscow University Press,” “Russian Institute of Social Sciences Publications,” and “Russian Social Sciences and Humanities Periodicals.”East View also has numerous more specialized databases covering topics such as governmental publications, the military and security sectors, and Islamic studies. These databases primarily aggregate born-digital content, and usually span the early-to-mid 1990s to the present. The older, digitized analog content in these databases appears to have been transcribed by hand, as the electronic text is clean. The individual aggregating databases and digital archives are sold separately. All of a given institution’s East View subscriptions are searchable through the company’s federated search interface, which accommodates a variety of search techniques, including truncation, proximity, and Boolean expressions. It includes English and Russian versions and allows for searching using Romanized (Russian) text, but using Cyrillic script in the Russian interface produces better results. The system has built-in lemmatization functionality, which is important for an intensely inflected language like Russian. Users should use the nominative-singular form of nouns and adjectives and the infinitives of verbs when searching. It should also be noted that almost all content in these databases related to Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus is in Russian, with a small minority of titles in English and Central Asian or Caucasian languages. Subscription resource.
• Integrum (via MIPP International): Suite of electronic content and instruments licensed through MIPP International. Overlaps with East View for contemporary journalistic and scholarly presses, newswires, legislative documents, and government documents, including publications of a variety of government agencies, among them the Russian Book Chamber. Also contains data related to social media and to private and public commercial and industrial entities, and offers instruments for aggregating and analyzing data from different sources, including media and social-media monitoring tools. Main customer base is European; not commonly subscribed to by academic and research libraries in North America. Subscription resource.
• American Bibliography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Online (ABSEEES): Aims to aggregate Western (primarily English-language) scholarly periodical content focused on Eastern Europe and the territories of the former Soviet Union, across the disciplines. Subscription resource.
• Central and East European Online Library (CEEOL): Database of eBooks, eJournals, and grey literature of full-text documents in the humanities and social sciences from and about Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in Russian, Eastern European/Slavic, English and other languages. Subscription resource.
• European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (EBSEES): Includes citations for books, journal articles, reviews, and dissertations from Eastern Europe (former countries of the Eastern Bloc) which were published in Belgium, Germany, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland from 1991 to 2007. Open access.

Other relevant disciplinary and multidisciplinary databases include:

• Historical Abstracts: Covers world history (excluding the US and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Subscription resource.
• MLA International Bibliography: From the Modern Language Association; focuses on cultural studies, languages, literatures, film, and folklore. Subscription resource.
• ProQuest Central: Multi-disciplinary database providing abstracts and indexing, with select full text for many core scholarly journals and popular press periodicals. Subscription resource.

News Sources and Media Outlets

The mass media sphere of this region of nine nation states and more national languages is far too vast and diverse to be encapsulated in any productive way. Indeed, on its own, the media sphere in the Russian Federation is immense, somewhat unstable, and complex, and all areas of public discourse in all media (print, broadcast, and online) have been vigorously contested throughout the post-Soviet period.

East View offers comprehensive or nearly comprehensive digital archives of several of the most impactful and widely circulated Russian newspapers and magazines of the 20^th century, such as Pravda, Izvestiia, and Literaturnaia Gazeta. These archives are made up of Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-processed full-page scans, and the searchable text is inevitably corrupted OCR output, which can lead to false positives and negatives in search results. The late-20th and 21^st century journalistic output is born-digital, appearing in the databases as clean electronic text.

For librarians and researchers new to this arena, it is advisable to start with East View. Other news aggregators with some amount of Russian-language news content include Factiva, Nexis Uni, and PressReader. Newcomers are also advised to seek the help of experienced specialist librarians through channels noted in the “Professional Development and Networks” section, below. For open access newspapers, see EastView’s Global Press Archive and Bogdan Horbal and Ernest Zitser’s Guide to Open Access Historical News Sources from Slavic, East European and Eurasian Countries, published on the website of the East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library Collections.

National and Other Major Libraries and Their Catalogs

In terms of library and union catalogs to use as bibliographic instruments, OCLC’s WorldCat is very useful for surveying all types of materials and formats—including, to some extent, electronic and archival collections from and/or about Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Bear in mind, however, that libraries in the region itself do not contribute their catalog records to WorldCat, meaning that North American libraries aiming to identify all relevant publications related to a given question or topic will need to supplement WorldCat searches with searches in the catalogs of the relevant libraries inside the region. For Russia, the two main catalogs are those of the Russian State Library (Российская государственная библиотека) in Moscow and the Russian National Library (Российская национальная библиотека) in St. Petersburg. The Russian National Library’s catalog interface is considerably friendlier for exploratory searching than that of the State Library. Both are more or less straightforward when it comes to known-item searches, and both offer English and Russian-language interfaces.

The catalogs of the national libraries for former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus can be found on the websites for the libraries noted below. Note that only some of these have English interfaces.

• Armenia: National Library of Armenia (Հայաստանի Ազգային Գրադարան)
• Azerbaijan: National Library of Azerbaijan (AZƏRBAYCAN MİLLİ KİTABXANASI)
• Georgia
  • The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia (საქართველოს პარლამენტის ილია ჭავჭავაძის სახელობის ეროვნული ბიბლიოთეკა)
  • National Scientific Library—Georgia (ეროვნული სამეცნიერო ბიბლიოთეკა)
• Kazakhstan: National Academic Library of Kazakhstan (Қазақстан Республикансының ұлттық академиялық кітапханасы)
• Kyrgyzstan: Alykul Osmonov National Library of the Kyrgyz Republic (Алыкул Осмонов атындагы Кыргыз Республикасынын улуттук китепканасы)
• Mongolia: The Mongolian National Library (Монгол улсын үндэсний номын сан)
• Tajikistan: National Library of Tajikistan (Китобхонаи миллии Тоҷикистон)
• Turkmenistan: State Library of Turkmenistan (Döwlet kitaphanasy)
• Uzbekistan: Alisher Navoiy National Library of Uzbekistan (Alisher Navoiy nomidagi O’zbekiston Milliy kutubxonasi)

Archives

The archival sphere in Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus is massive and complex. Owing to the long history of Russian/Soviet dominance in the region, certain categories of documents for the region as a whole are likely to be found in repositories inside the Russian Federation, while others are held in repositories in the territories of the now independent Central Asian and Caucasian nation states.

On its own, the world of archival repositories inside Russia can be challenging to navigate, owing in part to the collapse of Soviet-era institutions and the shifting of collections between repositories. The Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC) curates the freely accessible database Online Primary Resources for Russian, Caucasian, Central Asian, Eastern and Central Europe Studies, which allows filtering by geographical area, language, and time period, and contains links to archival documents.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, travel to Russia is unrealistic for many Western researchers. Paid research and delivery services offered by many of Russia’s archival repositories have become unavailable since Russia has been isolated from Western banking and payment systems. Researcher communities try to improvise various workarounds to get scholars access to the materials they need, but this is a complex and unstable landscape. Researchers who believe archival materials in Russian repositories are important for their projects should consult the SEELANGS and SLAVLIB email lists (discussed in more detail in the “Professional Development and Networks” section).

For those researchers who are able to travel to Russia to undertake archival research, Russian archives can present bureaucratic challenges that researchers and the librarians assisting them need to negotiate. Some archives are open for limited hours and require substantial advance notice in order for materials to be made available. Some require letters of introduction from faculty advisors or officials at academic institutions. Some prohibit photography or any kind of reproduction of the documents in their collections by researchers themselves, and some charge prohibitively high fees for reproduction services. Any researcher without substantial prior experience with Russian archives should seek advice well in advance of their trip. In most cases, it will be advisable to seek advice from people with knowledge of the specific relevant repository or repositories through venues such as the SEELANGS and SLAVLIB listservs .

The following is a very cursory list of the largest Russian archival repositories in two categories.

The primary humanities archival repositories in Russia are:

• The Russian State Literature and Art Archive (RGALI)
• The Institute of Russian Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences (IRLI RAN)
• The Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI; https://spbarchives.ru/cgali—link inactive as of June 10, 2024)
• The Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library
• The Manuscript Collection of the Russian National Library

The primary archival repositories for history and politics in Russia are:

• The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)
• The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)

While North American researchers are growing accustomed to online finding aids and inventories of archival repositories that allow them to undertake remote preliminary exploration of fonds and to formulate plans to optimize their use of limited onsite time, this is not quite as widespread in Russia. Some websites for archival repositories are still little more than landing pages, giving very general information about location, hours, regulations, and scope of the collections. Others, particularly sites for the larger repositories, allow users to freely explore the structure of various fonds and opisi (the Russian term roughly equivalent to finding aids) online.

Due to the sizable Russian diasporas in Western Europe and North America, there are numerous important archival and manuscript collections related to Russia in Western European and North American repositories. Broadly speaking, these are the papers of intellectual, political, and cultural figures of whom, and/or of whose work, the Soviet atmosphere was aggressively intolerant. Here are a few representative examples:

• Leon Trotsky Papers at Harvard Library
• Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers (Finding Aid) at the Library of Congress
• Vladimir Nabokov Papers at New York Public Library
• Joseph Brodsky Papers at Yale University
• Osip Mandel’shtam Papers, 1900-1979 (mostly 1914-1937) at Princeton University Library
• Sergei Rachmaninoff Archive at the Library of Congress
• Papers pertaining to the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the Hoover Institution
• Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University Libraries, possibly the largest single concentration of important émigré archival collections in North America

Any collection supporting research and teaching where users are likely to work directly with manuscripts and archives related to Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, or the Caucasus should have the following:

Grant, Steven A., and John H. Brown. 1981. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States. Boston: G.K. Hall. Downloadable version at the Library of Congress. Open access.

Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. 2000. Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Online version via East View: Archeo BiblioBase: Archives of Russia. Open access.

Bibliographies and Reference Tools

The field of bibliography and reference works related to the study of Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, and the Caucasus is too massive and diverse to be meaningfully dealt with here. Moreover, owing to the trends towards interdisciplinarity and decanonization discussed earlier, it is far less feasible than it once was to compile lists of essential resources or to distinguish between essential and secondary bibliographic and reference resources. For librarians without advanced specialist preparation who inherit responsibilities for this region, it is best to define the collecting profile of the library in this area in close collaboration with relevant faculty, and to determine the scope for bibliographic and reference sources from there. For some collections, relevant English-language reference resources from Western publishers may be sufficient. Some may require the more extensive and granular coverage provided by resources published in the region in some disciplinary or thematic areas but not others. In any event, it is advisable to consult guides compiled by specialist librarians, and/or these librarians themselves.

The Russian National Bibliography (RNB), a database published by East View, amalgamates bibliographic data from the many bibliographic periodicals (letopisi) published by the Russian Book Chamber, the entity that administers Russia’s legal deposit system which has now been incorporated into the Russian State Library (Российская государственная библиотека). RNB includes bibliographic information for monographs, journal articles, magazine articles, newspaper articles, dissertations, musical scores, and graphic and cartographic publications from 1998 forward.

The University of Illinois also has an excellent suite of resource guides covering Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union, including:

• National Bibliographies
• General Resources
• Research Resources by Country

Distinctive Print Collections

Materials from the republics and languages of the former Soviet Union are well-represented in many academic and public libraries in North America. Some possess remarkable holdings or rarities, while others exhibit tremendous depth and breadth of holdings. Not surprisingly, the vernacular language most widely held is Russian. While there are many excellent collections, developed on an ongoing basis via approvals plans, firm orders, and, in some cases, exchanges; we will only mention some of the most linguistically diverse institutions, staffed by full-time librarians actively involved in collection development. Reach out to these specialists for their advice: we are a friendly and helpful group.

Non-Academic Research Collections

The Library of Congress (LC) is the single-largest repository for materials from and about this diverse region, developed through a combination of strategic purchases (for example, the 1905 purchase of Siberia’s Yudin Collection of some 80,000 volumes), exchanges, and approval plans. Today, the staff of LC’s European Reading Room, Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room, and (for Central Asian and Caucasian-language materials) the Near East Section of the African & Middle Eastern Reading Room perform both collection development and public service duties. Although LC collects actively in all languages, the single-largest group consists of Russian-language holdings. See The Russian Collections at the Library of Congress for more information.

The New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Slavic and East European collections pre-date the founding of the NYPL in 1895. Beginning in 1898, when the former Slavonic Division was established, NYPL distinguished itself by developing collections that covered a broad swath of humanistic and social science subjects in the full array of Slavic and Baltic languages. Russian holdings are especially distinguished by extensive purchases of nationalized imperial collections during the Soviet period, sold abroad by the USSR in return for needed hard currency.

Academic Libraries

In the northeastern US, the Slavic, Caucasian, and Central Asian collections of Harvard University and Columbia University, with roots in the late 1890s and early 1900s, are notable both for their size and linguistic diversity. Harvard’s collections are collectively the largest in North America, with intensive development begun under the auspices of Professor and Harvard College Library Director Archibald Cary Coolidge (d. 1928) and his successor at HCL, the Byzantinologist Robert Pierpont Blake (d. 1950). The collections have expanded steadily (and often spectacularly) ever since, with collecting centered in Widener Library’s Americas, Europe, and Oceania Division, and the Middle Eastern Collection for Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Columbia’s Russian, Eurasian, & East European Studies Collections got a later start (ca. 1903), but thanks to its propitious location at the heart of a large and diverse immigrant community, and to the leadership of outward-looking President Nicholas Murray Butler (d. 1947), it, too, has grown steadily over more than a century, encompassing the broadest range of languages of the former Soviet Union. Columbia is home to the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian & East European History & Culture, founded in 1951, today the second-largest repository of its kind in the US, exceeded only by the holdings of the Hoover Institution (see below). A pioneer in Soviet nationalities studies, Professor Edward Allworth (d. 2016) played a direct and active role in building Columbia’s holdings in non-Russian languages, most especially for Central Asia and the Caucasus.

In the Midwest, the largest single comprehensive collection is the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s Slavic and East European Studies Collection. Although established only in the post-war period, the collection grew dramatically, quantitatively eclipsing many of the much older holdings in the Northeast. Illinois’ distinguished—and free-of-charge—Slavic Reference Service has served North American scholarship since 1976. Holdings in Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago are also linguistically broad, and venerable, dating from at least the tenure of Slavicist Samuel Northrup Harper (d. 1943). And Indiana University at Bloomington maintains a rich tradition of collecting for its Slavic and East European Studies Collection, especially in the Central Asian and Slavic languages.

The West Coast of the US holds outstanding research collections. Slavic & East European Studies Collections at the University of California, Berkeley, have grown steadily over the years, and UC-Berkeley has also played a key role in preserving print resources held privately in the region. Holdings for Stanford University’s Slavic & Eastern European Collections have grown exponentially in recent decades, especially in the Eastern Slavic and Baltic languages. The Hoover Institution’s Russia and Eurasia Collection at Stanford includes not only unique manuscript and archival material for the study of the region, but many rare pamphlets and other ephemeral materials, collected in situ, in part by Odesa-born archivist and historian Frank A. Golder (d. 1929). The University of Washington in Seattle has extensive holdings in Slavic languages (particularly Baltic and South Slavic).

In Canada, the largest collections of materials are housed at the University of Toronto Libraries. The University became a serious collector of materials from the region at the beginning of the Cold War, when it established its Department of Slavic Studies with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.

In terms of utilizing the collections of these institutions, the single-most important tools are, of course, the respective library catalogs. For each, however, there is often a significant body of material—i.e., articles, specialized catalogs—that highlight significant holdings and areas of strength. For example, see recent stand-alone issues of the subscription journal Slavic & East European Information Resources (SEEIR) devoted to the Library of Congress (vol. 9/2, 2008), the Stanford/Hoover Institution (vol. 17/3, 2016), and Columbia (vol. 23/1-2, 2022). Some of the older collections—i.e., Harvard, NYPL—have a particularly rich legacy of articles, catalogs, and other literature documenting their holdings. These are most easily identified by contacting the individuals responsible for regional collections. Another helpful resource is the following:

Urbanic, Allan and Beth Feinberg, eds. 2004. A Guide to Slavic Collections in the United States and Canada. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Information Press.

Professional Development and Networks

The Association for Slavic East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) is the largest Western pandisciplinary scholarly association for the study of Eastern Europe and the territories of the former Soviet Union, and the primary association to which all scholars in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies must belong. Its Committee on Libraries and Information Resources (ASEEES CLIR) is the primary professional body for librarians with professional responsibilities related to the region. ASEEES CLIR has three subcommittees: the Subcommittee on Collection Development, the Subcommittee on Copyright Issues, and the Subcommittee on Education and Access. ASEEES CLIR collaborates closely with The Slavic & East European Materials Project (SEEMP), administered by the Center for Research Libraries, and frequently convenes a variety of ad hoc committees and task forces. Those new to librarianship for Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union, and interested in learning about the broader profession, should consider joining ASEEES and taking active part in the work of ASEEES CLIR.

The European Studies Section (ESS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries is a professional librarian body of pan-European scope and, as such, represents librarianship focused on the former Warsaw Pact countries, including Russia. Its roster of committees and discussion groups includes the Slavic Cataloging and Metadata Committee and the Slavic & Eastern European Discussion Group. The former publishes the Slavic Cataloging Manual, the authoritative guide for Western catalogers of materials in Slavic languages. The aforementioned journal Slavic & East European Information Resources is a source to help librarians keep up-to-date on book history, collections, and other aspects of Slavic and East European librarianship.

In terms of wider professional networks that can offer support and assistance with challenging reference and research-support questions, as well as with questions related to collection development, the SLAVLIB email list is often the most efficient way to draw on the aggregate expertise of librarians in the field. The Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois is another invaluable resource of which librarians can avail themselves and to which they can also refer researchers directly. For some questions, the broader SEELANGS list for scholars and students may be the best venue.

References

MLA Language Enrollment Database, 1958-2021. n.d. Accessed July 22, 2022. https://apps.mla.org/flsurvey_search.

Russian Book Chamber [Российская книжная палата]. n.d. “CТАТИСТИЧЕСКИЙ УЧЕТ ПЕЧАТНОЙ ПРОДУКЦИИ РОССИИ” [“Statistical Register of Print Publication in Russia”]. Accessed February 11, 2022. https://www.rsl.ru/ru/rkp/statistika-pechati-1i-spravochnaya-rabota.