LibGuides: Slavic and Eurasian Studies: Digital Collections and Databases

Digital Collections of Slavic Resources

Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects
Extensive (100+ entries) list of links to projects from America and all over Russia and the former Soviet Union. Wide range of content formats includes manuscript materials, photographs, film, historical newspapers, art, numismatic collections, maps, and library holdings pertaining to an equally wide range of subjects.
Cold War International History Project:
Contains extensive digitized archival materials pertaining to the Cold War period. Materials are presented in HTML format and in English translation. Collections of special note include those relating to the Cuban missile crisis and to Soviet relations with a wide number of other countries during the Cold War era.
Images of Russia and Caucasus Region, 1929-1933:
Photographs of architecture, landscapes, people, cities and towns in the Caucasus and Russia.
Monoskop
A wiki page containing a large number of materials relating to Russian and East European literature, with a focus on the twentieth century avant-garde.
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https://monoskop.org/Monoskop
Reflections: Russian Photographs, 1992-2002
Contains photographs from the archives of the Moscow Times, chronicling various aspects of life in Russia in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
State Hermitage Museum:
Extensive gallery of high-resolution images of items from the State Hermitage Museum's collection. Categories include paintings, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, arms and armor, archeological artifacts, and more from all over the world.
Electronic Dissertation Library (Russian State Library)
Body of full-text electronic versions of dissertations from universities all over Russia.
Russian Archives Database
Project led by the University of Kansas in cooperation with Rosarkhiv to facilitate access to Russian archival materials. Database contains digitized copies of archival collection guides from a range of local and state archives. Continually updated with new materials.
Library of Electronic Resources:
Organized and maintained by the History Department of Moscow State University. Collection of primary source materials encompassing a wide range of countries and time periods, with a strong focus on Russia and its development up through the Soviet era. Site also includes organized collection of source materials relating to the history of labor in Russia from the 1880s through the 1930s.
Olonetskiie gubernskiie vedemosti (Олонецкие губернские ведомости)
Site has digitized copies of the Olonetskiie Gubernskiie Vedemosti, published from 1838 to 1917. Excellent source of information on provincial life in imperial Russia, and of ethnocultural material on the Russian North. Limited search functions and contents listings available. In Russian only.
BIBLIOPHIKA
An open digital library of digitized materials from the State Public Historical Library of Russia (GPIB). It currently contains over 460,000 pages from 1,235 volumes published before 1917. It covers a broad range of topics, including laws of the Russian Empire, sources on the history, geography and ethnography of Russia, genealogy, heraldry, history, and culture.
Stalinka: Digital Library of Staliniana
An online resource on Stalin and Stalinism assembled at the University of Pittsburgh, this collection is comprised of visual materials and artifacts related to Stalin. Includes photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, and more.
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online
A resource providing digitized materials selected from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS). The digital collection consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, the HPSSS includes vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions.
Anti-Soviet Electronic Library: Historical Materials and Books
A collection of historical materials, autobographies, fiction, samizdat, and memoirs relating to life in the Soviet union from an anti-Soviet perspective. Most of the books provided are in the PDF, HTML, DOC, or DJVU formats.
Belgrade University Library Newspapers
A collection of digitized newspapers from the library of Belgrade University.
Russia Before the 18th Century
A collection of historical texts compiled by scholars at Moscow State University; all have been made into electronic texts, and some contains images of original documents.
Library of Congress Russian Collections
An overview of the Library of Congress's Russian materials, with links to online collections and surveys of the holdings by unit.
Togda
Togda's online library.

Select Databases

ABSEES: American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies
1990 - present. Unlimited users.

Updated monthly. Covers North American scholarship on Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. It contains bibliographic records for journal articles, books, book chapters, book reviews, dissertations, and selected government publications.
EBSEES: European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies
1991 - 2007. Unlimited users.
The EBSEES (European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies) covers European scholarship on Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. It contains bibliographic records for journal articles, books, book chapters, book reviews, dissertations, and selected government publications.
Database updates ended in December 2007. The end date for each country’s contribution varies.
JSTOR
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Academic Search Complete
1865 - present. Unlimited users.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Pravda Digital Archive
1912 - Present. Unlimited.
Contains all published issues of Pravda between 1912 to present. Founded in 1912 in St. Petersburg, Pravda originated as an underground daily workers’ newspaper, and soon became the main newspaper of the revolutionary wing of the Russian socialist movement. Today, Pravda still remains the official organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. This database features full page-level digitization, complete original graphics, and searchable text.
Pravda Ukrainy Digital Archive
1938 - 2014. Unlimited.
The Pravda Ukrainy Digital Archive contains all obtainable published issues of the newspaper from 1938 to 2014, totaling over 72,000 pages. The archive offers scholars the most comprehensive collection available for this title, and features full page-level digitization, complete original graphics, and searchable text.
Iskusstvo Kino Digital Archive
Digital archive of Iskusstvo kino, the leading journal of Russian cinema critics. Publishes reviews of contemporary Russian and foreign movies, articles on history and theory of Russian and world cinema as well as general essays on Russian culture and arts. Also includes digital archives of Proletarskoe kino (1931-1932) and Sovetskoe kino (1933-1935).
Soviet-Era Ukrainian Newspapers
1899 - 1939. Unlimited users.
Comprising five titles and more than 50,000 pages, the Soviet-Era Ukrainian Newspapers collection includes national newspapers from three cities (Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv), covering the early Soviet era of Ukraine’s history. These titles offer granular insight into important events in Ukraine’s history, including the Ukrainian War of Independence and the Holodomor. The collection includes newspapers in both Ukrainian and Russian.

Part of the Global Press Archive initiative. Open Access to this collection is made possible through the generous support of the Center for Research Libraries and its member institutions.
MLA International Bibliography
1926 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated ten times per year. Indexes critical materials on literature, criticism, drama, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Provides access to citations from over 4,400 journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Produced by the Modern Language Association.
RAND Documents
1948 - current. Unlimited users.
RAND is a nonprofit public policy research institution. It was established after World War II to study national security. In the 1960s it added domestic policy problems to its research agenda. Current areas of research and analysis include national defense, education and training, health care, criminal and civil justice, labor and population, science and technology, community development, international relations, and regional studies. This searchable archive includes more than 17,000 titles dating back to 1948. Some RAND documents are not included in this database. Search the Library Catalog or ask library staff for assistance to locate these.
UDB (Universal Database) of Russian and NIS Statistics
1990 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Online versions of 101 publications, reports and data sets released by the Russian State Statistics Committee and the Commonwealth of Independent States Statistical Committee. Includes regional and national statistics on demographics, labor, public health, education, tourism, transportation, industry, agriculture, and other socioeconomic topics. Content primarily in Russian; some English.
All tables are provided in HTML and can be easily downloaded into Excel.
Access to this resource is partially funded by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies.
World Development Indicators (WDI)
1960 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly. An extensive collection of data about global development. Provides more than 550 times series covering demographic, social, economic, financial, natural resources and environmental topics for more than 200 countries and 18 country groups. You can access the data through the dataBank, as an ebook, or in Excel or CSV formats.
World Bank Terms of Use
World News Connection
1995 - 2013. Unlimited users.
Contains materials provided to the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The reports are full text, English translations of foreign news sources and information. Many of the materials are copyrighted. Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources. Compiled from thousands of worldwide media sources.
World dataBank
1960 - present. 1 user.
Updated regularly. Free access to more than 7,000 indicators from over 20 datasets on world development, including World Development Indicators and Global Development Finance. Dates of coverage begin in 1960 but vary by dataset and country. You can create reports with tables, charts, and maps and export the results in standard formats.
World Bank Publications
1946 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. An online collection of more than 130,000 World Bank documents and publications. Browsing or searching provides access to the documents in both text and downloadable PDF format.
The World Bank is one of the United Nations' specialized agencies, and is made up of 187 member countries. All World Bank publications and research working papers are now assigned with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).
International Debt Statistics
1970 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated annually. Provides a comprehensive view of prospects from the global economy along with the implications for developing countries' external finance. Presents detailed data for 128 countries that report public and publicly guaranteed debt under the World Bank Debtor Reporting System. You can access the data through the dataBank, as an ebook, or in Excel or CSV formats.
World Bank Terms of Use