Harvard Library's Slavic Blog

Krasnyi Arkhiv digital archive

Minneapolis, MN : East View Information Services

HOLLIS # 6918745

Harvard ID-holders now have access to another online primary source archive: Krasnyi arkhiv digital archive.  Krasnyi arkhiv was a scholarly historical journal published in Moscow in 1922-1941 by the Central Archive and later by the Central Archival Administration of the USSR and Russian Federation.  Krasnyi arkhiv published important archival materials on the history of Tsarist Russia and the early years of the Soviet Union.

The journal published archival documents related to the Soviet history as well as pre-Revolutionary period, members of the royal family and top officials of the Tsarist Russia, World War I, the Revolution and civil war, the Bolshevik / Communist party and its dignitaries, Russian politics in Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan, etc. In addition to that, it published archival documents and literary materials on prominent Russian classical authors and literary critics (e. g. Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and others.

The present database, Krasnyi Arkhiv. Digital Archive contains the entire collection (106 volumes, 1,010 articles, more than 23,000 pages), completely digitized with full-image browsing and full-text article-level search and browse functions.

Zavod “Diafoto“ :

• Reki i ozera SSSR : seriia 585,
• Sel’skoe khoziaistvo SSSR : seriia 98

The Davis Center Collection at Fung Library is pleased to announce the digitization of two rare glass slide collections dating from the Stalin era. Series 98. Agriculture of the U.S.S.R. (1940) consists of 43 sequentially numbered images showing agricultural practices across the Soviet Union. Series 585. Rivers and Lakes of the U.S.S.R., also from the 1940’s, contains 55 images depicting various bodies of water and the uses to which they are put by Soviet citizens. Some of the images are black-and-white; others are tinted or hand-colored. The Diafoto factory, in Moscow, was famous for the captioned educational slides which it manufactured from the 1930’s through the 1950’s — but few of these “diapositives,” as they were called, have survived to this day. This is believed to be the only collection of Diafoto slides owned by a library in the United States.

The digital images are now publicly accessible via HOLLIS+ and HOLLIS Images. The original slides are held by the Davis Center Collection and have undergone preservation at the Weissman Center.

(Information for this post was contributed by Svetlana Rukhelman, Davis Center Collection)

Slavic Humanities Index
[Toronto, Ontario] : Slavus, [2013?]-

We would like to bring to your attention the Slavic Humanities Index, a fairly new bibliographic database in the field of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European Studies. It provides access to important scholarly periodicals published in the region that until recently had remained largely unindexed. It includes publications from Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Presently, the Slavic Humanities Index includes 233,006 records from 11,263 periodicals.

The index offers access to bibliographic citations of articles, book reviews and other materials across different disciplines including: history, literature, philosophy, language, linguistics, ethnology, theater and film studies, cultural studies, borderland studies, and regional studies. In addition to indexing,  the database will soon include full text articles from periodicals published in countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia and possibly others.

The database offers basic and advanced search functionality. One can search by keyword, author, title, periodical title, and publication subject (Library of Congress Subject Headings). Every record is available in a vernacular language and transliterated using the Library of Congress and ISO-9 transliteration systems, as there are three sets of data. The database can be also searched by subject headings and personal name authority headings.

Padomju Latvijas 25. Gadadienai / 25 Years of Soviet Latvia

HOLLIS # 010022937

In 1965 the USSR celebrated the 25th anniversary of the restoration of Soviet power in Latvia. The date was marked by festivals, a commemorative stamp, a special meeting of the Latvian Communist Party’s central committee, the opening of the now-famous restaurant Jūras pērle in Jūrmala, and numerous other events and publications.

One such publication was a photo exhibit prepared in Riga by the Latvian Society for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries. Intended “to tell our friends abroad about Soviet Latvia” and issued by the Riga publisher Respublikanskii dom znanii, the exhibit consisted of 60 photographs depicting various facets of economic development and everyday life in the republic. Its focus was on eight categories: manufacturing, agriculture, fishing industry, science, child care and education, new construction, culture, and public health/sport. Captions in the accompanying booklet described each image, seeking to emphasize the progress the republic had made in these spheres since being annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Now the photographs and booklet are available online. The images are accompanied by their respective captions in the original Russian and in English translation, making the collection accessible to non-Russian-speakers. All text is fully searchable in HOLLIS Images.

The original photographs underwent preservation at the Weissman Preservation Center and are held by the Davis Center Collection at Fung Library.

(The contents for this post were contributed by Svetlana Rukhelman, Davis Center Collection)

The Poliksena N. Shishkina-Iavein digital image collection

HOLLIS # 013606912

This new digital collection of over 140 images documents the life of Poliksena N. Shishkina-Iavein (1875-1947). A physician and leading member of the pre-revolutionary Russian feminist movement, she is best known for her pivotal role in securing the vote for Russia’s women in 1917. The collection contains photographs of events and philanthropic enterprises organized by the St. Petersburg-based Russian League for Women’s Equal Rights, which Shishkina-Iavein chaired from 1910 through 1917. These include meetings at the League’s headquarters, the opening of the First All-Russian Congress on Women’s Education in 1912, literacy courses for women, an infirmary for wounded soldiers, and a dormitory for female refugees. Also included are photographs of Shishkina-Iavein and her collaborators, among them League co-founder Ol’ga Ianovskaia and the politician Count Ivan Tolstoi, who represented the League’s interests in the State Duma. Found in the collection as well are newspaper clippings, posters for speeches and public debates at which Shishkina-Iavein presided, and a series of postcards issued by the League in 1914, honoring prominent female artists, scientists, writers, and politicians. In addition, the collection contains photographs of Shishkina-Iavein’s husband, children, and other family members.

All text and annotations that appear in the photographs have been transcribed and translated into English, making them fully searchable in HOLLIS Images and the images suitable for research by users who do not read Russian. A digital finding aid contains links to all the images, as well as further biographic and historical details.

The hard-copy originals remain in St. Petersburg with Shishkina-Iavein’s granddaughter, Nonna Igorevna Iavein, who generously permitted the Davis Center Collection at Fung Library to create digital copies and make them available to a wider audience. Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild was instrumental in bringing about this digitization project.

(This post was contributed by Svetlana Rukhelman, Davis Center Collection)

Stalin Digital Archive

[New Haven] Yale University Press, 2011-

HOLLIS # 13752638

Harvard ID-holders now have access to Stalin Digital Archive, a web-based archive of primary and secondary research documents that have previously only been available at the RGASPI archive in Russia. Specifically, The Stalin Digital Archive contains a selection of documents from Fond 558, which covers Stalin’s personal biography, his work in government, and his conduct of foreign affairs:

• Opis 1: documents written by Stalin from 1889-1952.
• Opis 2: documents written by Stalin from 1911-1944.
• Opis 3: over 300 books from Stalin’s personal library with his marginal notes.
• Opis 4: Stalin’s biographical materials.
• Opis 11: Stalin’s correspondence and documents. This Opis covers a period from 1917 to 1952.

The Stalin Digital Archive is a result of collaboration between the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and Yale University Press (YUP) to create an electronic database of finding aids, to digitize documents and images, and to publish in different forms and media materials from the recently declassified Stalin archive in the holdings of RGASPI. Digital versions of Yale’s Annals of Communism series supplement the RGASPI collection with additional scholarly commentary on selected documents concerning the history of Soviet and international communism from Russian state archives spanning the 75-year history of the USSR.

Soviet ephemera, 1976-1978.

HOLLIS # 014148652

Introducing another ephemera collection that has been made available recently in both physical and digitized form. This small collection contains 3 groups of documents:

1. materials produced in connection with the 89th anniversary of a 1887 students’ political meeting (“Leninskai͡a skhodka”) at the Kazan university (1976),
2. a book censor’s letter to the Moscow Railroads libraries with censorship instructions (1977, pictured),
3. a statement for the foreign press from a “free inter-labor” movement Svobodnoe Mezhprofessionalʹnoe Obʺedinenie trudi͡ashchikhsi͡a (SMOT, 1978).

Iskusstvo kino
Moskva, 1931-
HOLLIS # 000170066

The Iskusstvo Kino Digital Archive (by Minneapolis, MN : East View Information Services, available for Harvard ID holders) captures the complete run (1931-2012) of this illustrated analytical journal of film criticism in a complete online archive, in full-image and fully searchable text. Initially published monthly from 1931-1941 (in 1931-1932 under the title Proletarskoe kino, in 1933-1935 as Sovetskoe kino), Iskusstvo kino was temporarily suspended during World War II and then was published irregularly during 1945-1947 and bimonthly during 1947-1951 before resuming monthly publication in 1952.  A text-only archive of Iskusstvo kino from 2013 is also available online via HOLLIS.

As part of the project to preserve old and fragile books through digitization, 432 such titles published before 1922 have recently been digitized and are accessible directly from HOLLIS. The titles were published in various Slavic countries, and most of them are in various Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Church Slavic, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian), but there are also a few titles with some content in Chinese, German, French, Korean, English, etc.)

In addition to the images, the library digitization services also provided OCR (optical character recognition), i. e. machine-readable rendition of the text.

In order to see this collection in its entirety in HOLLIS, please enter the search string: Slavic poor paper digitization project and refine your search results by resource type (“Book”) and by format (“show only online”) – you will see the list of all titles in the project. Alternatively, you can follow this link.