Russian Historical News Sources

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Тhe Russian Federation has many digital libraries. Nearly every Russian digital library provides access to digitized newspapers, including those of ethnic minorities. The most efficient way to access these newspapers is to consult Газеты в сети и вне её, the digital newspaper guide compiled by the bibliographers of the Newspapers Department of Russian National Library in St. Petersburg.

• Газеты в сети и вне её (Russian National Library)
  This exhaustive, Russian-language, electronic directory of “newspapers on- and off-line” offers links to hundreds of digitized newspapers from Russia (and some from abroad), providing access to nearly two hundred years of news coverage (18th-20th centuries).

  • To locate a specific newspaper title:

    • search the A-Z list of titles, including those that employ numbers, special characters or that are printed in non-Cyrillic alphabets

    • search the A-Z list of places of publication, including those with no known place of publication

    • search the A-Z list by language of publication

    • search the “Calendar of Digitized Newspapers” by year of publication

    • conduct a “title” (заглавие) or “place of publication” (место издания) search in the guide’s dedicated search box

  • To locate a specific digital library:

    • search the A-Z title list of digital libraries

    • conduct a “keyword” search (любое поле) in the newspaper guide’s dedicated search box

  • To conduct full-text keyword searching:

    • The search box of the Russian National Library does not allow you to conduct a full-text keyword search within a specific newspaper.

    • To conduct a full-text keyword searching within a specific newspaper:

      • identify and navigate to the digital library that holds your newspaper title

      • select the specific newspaper title that you wish to search

      • conduct a full-text keyword search (if available) within that particular newspaper

• Imperial Russian Newspapers (Center for Research Libraries & Eastview Information Services, Inc.)
  Includes 19 Russian-language newspapers, primarily from Moscow and St. Petersburg (1782-1918).

• Gazety perioda Pervoi mirovoi i grazhdanskoi voin, 1914-1922 (Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Historical Society)
  Selected issues of over 400 Russian-language, provincial newspapers, published between the start of World War I and the end of the Russian Civil War.

• Russian exile publications (UB Bern – Swiss Library of Eastern Europe)
  Includes 5 newspapers (4 in Russian, 1 in English) published abroad by revolutionary groups: Начало (Paris, 1916-1917), Пролетарская правда (Peterburg, 1910-1912), Рабочее знамя (Lausanne, 1915, 1917; 1916 in Газеты в сети), Отклики (Bern, 1919), and Darkest Russia (London: Odhams, 1891).

• За индустриализацию (Moscow State University Department of Historical Informatics)
  Nearly complete set of issues for the years 1930 and 1937 (corresponding to the end of the First and Second Five Year plans, respectively) of the official organ of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (VSNkh SSSR) and (from 1932) People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (NKTP).

• ТАСС Вестник фронтовой информации (State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF)
  Digitized versions of 65 selected issues of the Frontline Herald, containing articles from TASS News Agency’s own war correspondents, published on the eve of the official declaration of the end of World War II (February to March 1945).

• Memorial Human Rights Center

  • Хроника текущих событий
    The online edition of Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1983), a type-written, informational bulletin, self-published (samizdat) by Soviet human rights activists.

  • Among the 2000 periodicals in Memorial's "Collection of socio-political documents" (1985-1999) are several digitized newspapers from the late- and early post-Soviet period.

• RIMA: Russian Independent Media Archive (PEN America and the Gagarin Center at Bard College, in collaboration with Internet Archive and Mass Media Defense Center)
  This "living archive" is a searchable database of articles from over a dozen media news sources, published in both Russian and English, from 2000 to the present.

Audio

• Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) Russian Broadcast Recordings (Open Society Archives)
  The collection contains 26,147 unique audio files (over 10 thousand hours of recordings) that were produced and broadcast by RFE/RL’s Russian Service for over four decades (1953-1995). The “broadcast archive” includes various “genres” of Radio Svoboda: “newsreels and special broadcasts; talk shows written and edited by famous writers, poets, musicians, historians and analysts; literary readings by authors or actors and radio plays; samizdat reviews; liturgies and talks by Orthodox Church reverends; music programs, interviews and press-conferences with fresh emigrants."

• Published Samizdat Sound Recordings, Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) (Open Society Archive)
  The collection contains 58 unique audio files (in Russian, English, German, Latvian, Lithuanian) that were produced and/or broadcast by RFE/RL’s Russian Service between 1970 and 1989. The nearly 18 hours of sound recordings include “telephone conversations between RFE/RL staff in Europe and the US, and opposition members in the USSR.” The online audio files complement RFE/RL’s analog collections of Published Samizdat (1964-1992) and Samizdat Archives (1956-1994), which can only be accessed onsite in the Archival Research Room of the OSA.

• "Закаленные Великой Отечественной..." 65-летие Победы в Великой Отечественной войне 1941-1945 гг. (Federal Archive Agency)
  Online exhibit includes a sound-recording of a fragment (1:17) of Stalin's radio address to the Soviet people (broadcast nationally on 3 June 1941), in which he announced the formation of the State Committee of Defense. The complete speech, with English subtitles, can be found on YouTube.

• Победа. 1941-1945 (Federal Archive Agency)
  In addition to numerous recordings of Soviet war-time poetry and songs, such as the 1943 "Song of the War Correspondents" (1:47), this online exhibit of archival documents includes a recording of the 10 May 1944 radio broadcast (5:33), during which the primary Soviet radio announcer (Iu. B. Levitan) read Stalin’s Order No. 111 (about the liberation of Sevastopol).

Visual

• Soviet Propaganda Film Collection (Open Society Archives)
  This collection of 109 Soviet propaganda films (1942-1989) includes 9 newsreels (1 in Russian, 6 dubbed in Hungarian, and 2 in Romanian), produced between 1944 and 1983. Some of the films in this collection may have been “news-worthy,” even if they were not “news” per se. No English subtitles.

• Soviet and Russian Television Monitoring (Open Society Archives)
  A collection of 3,874 videos (totaling almost 840 hours of material) of programs “produced in Russian and eight other languages” (English, German, Ukrainian, Polish, French, Hungarian, Kazakh, Japanese) by Soviet Central Television (1985-1991) and Ostankino Television (1992-1994), and “recorded by RFE/RL’s Monitoring Unit and successor agencies.” No English subtitles.

• Soviet Information Bureau Photograph Collection (Davis Center Collection for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University’s Fung Library)
  Almost 5,800 black-and-white photos (bulk 1946-1948) shot by official Soviet photographers in order to document the reconstruction of the Soviet Union following World War II. A description of the collection’s scope and content can be found in the online finding aid.

• World War II in Photographs Collection (The Houston Museum of Fine Arts)
  Includes 32 black-and-white photographs (1941-1945) shot by three different Soviet photojournalists: Evgeny Khaldey, Mark Markov-Grinberg, and Georgy Zelma.

• Stalinka: Digital Library of Staliniana (University of Pittsburgh Libraries)
  Digital collection includes 44 black-and-white photographs of Stalin and the Soviet leadership (1902-1953) from the collection of TASS Archives. Photojournalists include N. Sitnikov, V. Matvievskii, E. Evzerikhin, M. Al'pert, Malkhaz Machavariani, N. Kuleshov, N. Petrov, S. Gurarii, V. Khristoforov, and Vasilii Egorov.

• Фотодокументы ГКУВО "ЦДНИВО (Center for Documentation of the Contemporary History of the Volgograd Region)
  A collection of 19 unattributed, black-and-white photos of military combat in and around Stalingrad (1941-1945), as well as photos of World War II Soviet commanders.

• Революция 1917 года. Русская и советская дипломатия в документах архивов МИД России (Historico-Documentary Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia)
  Digital collection of archival documents includes 16 black-and-white photographs of post-Revolutionary and early Soviet diplomats, members of Soviet diplomatic missions abroad, and a couple of state events (reception of the first ambassador of Afghanistan [1919] and signing of treaty with Persia [1921]).

• 1939 год. От "умиротворения" к войне (Federal Archive Agency and Russian State Military Archive)
  This online exhibit of archival material includes 3 black-and-white Soviet newsreels (1939) depicting the arrival in Moscow of the military missions of England and France (0:31); the arrival in (5:22) and departure (1:51) from Moscow of the German foreign minister J. von Ribbentrop; as well as 102 black-and-white photographs, taken by unidentified, contemporary photojournalists of various countries.

• Сталинград. К 75-летию разгрома советскими войсками немецко-фашистских войск в Сталинградской битве (Federal Archive Agency)
  Digital exhibit containing nearly 120 black-and-white photographs taken by Soviet photojournalists (both named and unidentified) before, during, and after the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943).

• Эхо Сталинграда: Страны мира и победа на Волге (Historico-Documentary Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia)
  Digital exhibit of archival documents includes 6 black-and-white photographs of Soviet diplomats and their counterparts at war-time conferences (1943-1945).

• "Закаленные Великой Отечественной..." 65-летие Победы в Великой Отечественной войне 1941-1945 гг. (Federal Archive Agency)
  Online exhibit featuring original, black-and-white photographs taken by Soviet photojournalists (both named and unidentified) during World War II.

• Нюрнбергский процесс в документах российских архивов (Federal Archive Agency)
  Digital exhibit containing over 100 black-and-white photographs, including "trophy photographs" extracted from the Nazis in preparation for the Nuremberg trials, as well as images of the trial itself, its participants, and the journalists who were assigned to cover it.

• Победа. 1941-1945 (Federal Archive Agency)
  Based on the digitized holdings of several Russian state archival repositories, this online exhibit contains a database of over 2,500 archival photos (1938-2000) and over 130 snippets from Soviet films (mostly black-and-white) documenting the Soviet war-effort and, thereby, demonstrating how Soviet war correspondents and photojournalists covered World War II.

• Сталин--Черчилль--Рузвельт: совместная борьба с нацизмом = Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt: Common Fight against Nazism (Federal Archive Agency)
  Online exhibit of documents (1938-1945), including a newsreel (1:43) of Vyacheslav Molotov’s visit to England in 1942; excerpts from three documentaries: "War in the Arctic" (7:07) and "Allies" (31:28), films No. 6 and 17 (respectively) from the series “The Great Patriotic War”; and "The Potsdam Conference" (5:09). Also includes dozens of black-and-white photos taken by Soviet photojournalists, both anonymous and named, including such figures as Evgenii Khaldei, Nikolai Vlasik (?), Mikhail Kalashnkikov, Fedor Kislov, Oleg Knorring, К. Moiseyev, Samary Gurary, Georgy Khomzor, Olga Lander, Yefim Kopyt, Victor Tyomin, and S. Kuzmichev.

• Главные кадры: ТАСС отркывает фотоархивы (Russian News Agency TASS)
  This online exhibit of 100 color and black-and-white photos of Soviet life, as captured by the cameras of TASS photojournalists, includes 5 photographs (2 color, 3 black-and-white) depicting "journalists at work and daily life of editorial offices."

• Russian Photographs, 1992-2002: Reflections (Library of Congress)
  Digital exhibit of 51 photographs (35 black-and-white and 16 color) from the archives of the Moscow Times, the "first English-language daily newspaper ever to be printed in Russia."

• Фотоархив Мемориала: репортажная фотография (Memorial Foundation)
  The human rights organization’s photo collection includes 136 examples (in both color and black-and-white) of what they refer to as “reportage photography” from 1930s to the late/post-Soviet period.

Online catalogs & bibliographies

• Газеты России (1703 - 1917) (Russian National Library)
  This searchable database contains bibliographic descriptions of all the newspapers published on the territory of the Russian Empire (within its 1913 borders) in the Russian language, from 1703-1917 inclusively. Additionally, the catalog includes newspapers published in foreign cities containing large populations of the Russian diaspora (e.g. L'viv, ‎Chernivtsi, Kharbin), as well as newspapers published by military units.

• Russian Newspapers Collection (Library of Congress)
  The website of the European Reading Room includes online guides to “the largest and most comprehensive collection of Russica outside of Russia.”

  • Russian Newspapers at the Library of Congress (compiled by Angela Cannon)
    Online bibliography listing over 1600 Russian newspapers (1715-present), published “in the current territory of Russia regardless of the language of publication, as well as all Russian-language newspapers published anywhere else in the world. However, it does not contain non-Russian language titles from the former Soviet Union published in republics that became independent countries."

  • Russian Newspapers from the United States at the Library of Congress (compiled by Angela Cannon)
    Description of over 60 Russian-language émigré newspapers titles, published in the U.S.A. before 1917 (7), from 1917–1923 (16), from 1924–1945 (13), from 1946–1991 (9), and from the post-Soviet era beginning in 1992 (23).

  • Soviet Independent Press 1985-1992: a Guide to Holdings at the Library of Congress
    List of microfilmed holdings of primarily Russian-language newspapers (ca. 1900 titles) from all the former republics of the Soviet Union. For newspaper titles in non-Russian languages, consult the 1991 online finding aid to New Soviet and Baltic Independent Serials at the Library of Congress: a Holdings List (page view; searchable pdf).

  • Eighteenth Century Russian Publications in the Library of Congress: A Catalog (compiled by Tatiana Fessenko)
    Digitized version of the 1961 catalog (page view; searchable pdf), containing entries for 3 newspaper titles: Viedomosti (No. 1237), Sanktpeterburgskiia viedomosti (No. 1051), and Moskovskie viedomosti and its supplement (No. 665).