New: Four digital archives to boost Ukrainian and Slavonic studies

The Ukrainian Flag (top half in blue, top bottom in yellow.

Digital collections of twentieth-century Ukrainian newspapers and a Russian journal from the start of the nineteenth century can be found in SOLO’s Databases A – Z

A black and white newspaper cutting showing a group of young men and women looking at some newspapers.

This picture is from Sovetskaia Ukraina December 31 1939, p. 3. Materials republished from products and services originally made available by East View Information Services. Email: eastview@eastview.com URL: www.eastview.com

Oxford University members can now read four new primary sources on the history and politics of Ukraine and the Russian Empire, at a time when access to regional archives is severely constrained. These crucial resources enable researchers to forge truthful accounts of Ukraine and its successive colonial governments, within the broader struggle against the re-writing of Ukrainian and Russian history.

The Pravda Ukrainy Digital Archive presents first Sovetskaia Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine) founded in 1938, and its later incarnation Pravda Ukrainy (The truth of Ukraine). These newspapers were the mouthpiece of Ukraine’s Communist Party. They were a Ukrainian version of the Soviet-wide Communist newspaper Pravda (Truth), also in our collection. During the 1990s Pravda Ukrainy dramatically changed tack, becoming a key supporter of democratic politics and independent journalism. The newspaper closed in 2014.

The Demokratychna Ukraina Digital Archive contains an almost complete run of the newspaper Demokratychna Ukraina (Democratic Ukraine), after it was transformed in 1992 into one of Ukraine’s leading independent democratic newspapers. It shows in detail Ukraine’s transition to independence, and the political and social transformations that ensued – before Demokratychna Ukraina was eventually closed in 2020.

The Donetsk and Luhansk Newspaper Collection offers a unique view of the Russian-backed separatist administrations of Luhansk and Donetsk, from 2013–2015. These administrations and their armies produced several short-lived newspapers, as part of their propaganda. The newspapers in this collection demonstrate particularly clearly not only the ideological position of Russian-backed separatists, but also the publicly sanctioned emotional experience of these forces.

Vestnik Evropy (the herald of Europe) is one of the Russian Empire’s first journals, founded by the prominent Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin. No less a literary figure than Aleksandr Pushkin published his poems for the first time in this journal. It was intended as a forum for pro-European intellectuals, and continued its existence – albeit intermittently – during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Vestnik Evropy Digital Archive (1802 – 1830) complements the Bodleian’s existing print and electronic holdings, by presenting issues from Vestnik Evropy’s first decades.

These digital archives are provided by East View Information Services. You can run Cyrillic word-searches both within the individual collections, and across the entire East View platform; Vestnik Evropy has been transcribed into modern Russian orthography, so you can search using a normal Cyrillic keyboard. You can also download the pdf scans from the platform. These periodicals are in Russian and Ukrainian – however machine translation might be possible, depending on the quality of the scan.

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