Stalin Digital Archive

The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI)collection contains significant new material relating to many aspects of Joseph Stalin's political life deserving further study: foreign policy with Germany before World War II; his communications with Head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov during the Great Purges; his directives to the Politburo after WWII outlining his strategies for dealing with the new world order; relations with Western intellectuals and political leaders; and his private notations concerning Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Soviet leaders. The complete wartime correspondence between Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt is included in this archive, as are Stalin's letters to and from intellectuals in America, England, France, Germany, and Italy.

Of the entire Stalin Archive at RGASPI (Fond 558), consisting of approximately 40,000 documents, YUP has chosen to digitize the following documents pertinent to 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, as well as 188 maps with Stalin's hand-written markings. This Opis covers the period from 1917 to 1952.

The total size of the electronic archive is approximately 28,000 documents (404,000 pages). Featuring a newly designed interface with advanced search and browse functionality, the Stalin Digital Archive's platform has been designed to facilitate individual as well as collaborative research. The SDA allows users to compare specific documents side-by-side, save searches and documents into personal libraries, and define their own tags. The SDA also allows multiple users to join an online community of likeminded scholars; as part of this community, users can take part in discussion groups and freely share their annotations and tagging systems with colleagues.

The Annals of Communism

The SDA also includes fully-digitized transcriptions of books in Yale's acclaimed Annals of Communism (AOC) series. These volumes include translations of several hundred primary source documents, many of which will also be digitized as part of the Stalin Archive materials. This will allow for linking between the translations and images, facilitating side-by-side comparison of the English and Russian texts and the ability to more fully explore the material conditions of documents reproduced in the AOC series.

The archive now contains twenty-six AOC volumes and offers the ability to do search by keyword, date, author, and other parameters within all or selected titles, or limit the inquiry to primary documents reproduced in those books.

Gulag Voices: An Anthology
Edited by Anne Applebaum

Enemies Within the Gates?: The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939
William J. Chase

Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment
Edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953
Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov

Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives
Edited by Alexander Dallin and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov

The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–36
Compiled and edited by R. W. Davies, Oleg Khlevniuk, E. A. Rees, Liudmila P. Kosheleva, and Larisa A. Rogovaya

The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949
Georgi Dimitrov

Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933-1943
Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes

Children of the Gulag
Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky

The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Updated and Abridged Edition
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov

The Secret World of American Communism
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov

The Soviet World of American Communism
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson

The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Oleg Khlevniuk

Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents
Documents Compiled by Ludmila Kosheleva, Larisa Rogovaia, Lewis Siegelbaum, Andrei Sokolov, Vladimir-Telpukhovsky, and Sergei ZhuravlevText Preparation and Commentary by Lewis Siegelbaum, Andrei Sokolov, and Sergei Zhuravlev

Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev
Edited by Vladimir A. Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Sergei V. Mironenko

The Kirov Murder and Soviet History
Matthew E. Lenoe

The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive
Edited by Richard Pipes

Spain Betrayed
Edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov

The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov
Edited and annotated by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov

Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Edited and with introductions by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov

Stalin's Letters to Molotov: 1925-1936
Josef Stalin; Edited by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg Khlevniuk

Voices of Revolution, 1917
Mark D. Steinberg

The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution
Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv

Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits
Edited by Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko

The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, Volume One
Edited by Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov

The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov