Online Archives


SRAS has published an update on how archives are re-opening in Russia. It also supports scholars who are unable to travel to Russia for archival research due to the current restrictions on international travels.


  • The Internet Archive is a digitized archival library that provides Russian books available at academic libraries across the U.S.

  • Историческая экспертиза is an open access journal focused on issues related to Russian history.

  • Eurodocs, by the Harold B. Lee Library, is a comprehensive source of European primary historical documents ranging from antiquity up to this day that includes video clips, maps, photographs and databases.

  • The Kennan Institute and National Public Radio established an online audio archive of Soviet and Russian history with recordings dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet state

  • История России в фотографиях: Wide selection of photographs from 1860-1999 with captions, tags, and a search engine. It is sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture, and the Russian search engine Yandex. The photos come from museums, public archives, and personal collections.

  • The Cold War International History Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War.

  • The Cold War Archive is an online archive by the Davis Center at Harvard that makes public Cold War documents by the U.S. government.

  • Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives offers collections on Communism, the Cold War and their afterlife, as well as on human rights violations and war crimes, in Central & Eastern Europe.

  • The Soviet Nuclear History Archive by the Wilson Center is a collection of primary source documents related to the Soviet development of nuclear weapons from the 1940s up to the 1980s. It includes varied archival sources, early notes and letters by physicist Igor Kurchatov, who was the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project in the 1940s, and later Soviet nuclear developments and related international treaties.

  • The Soviet Archive of Vladimir Bukovsky provides scanned documents from briefly-opened-and-shot KGB archives. The quality is far from optimal, but the materials are hard to come by otherwise.

  • Making the History of 1989: A George Mason University project which assembles primary sources from former Soviet Union and satellite countries about events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.