Tag Archives: Slavonic history

New: Four digital archives to boost Ukrainian and Slavonic studies

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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 Materials republished from products and services originally made available by East View Information Services.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.

While you are here, why not check out…

Temporary access: East View ebooks / Late Qing and Republican Era Chinese Periodicals and Newspapers database

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Colleagues in other Bodleian Libraries have been busy setting up trials or temporary access to resources which will be of interest to historians working on modern Slavonic, Jewish history and Chinese history. As ever Oxford scholars need to use their SSO to gain remote access.

East View e-book collection (trial until 31 May 2020)

This resource gives you access to the East View Essential Classics Collection, the Dostoevsky Research series: Dostoevskii materialy i issledovaniia as well as East View’s Slavonic and Judaica collection. In addition it offers, reference works including encyclopedias and atlases as well as e-books from a wide range of different subject areas including linguistics, philosophy science, social science, history, business, economics.

It also includes biographical works. Some of the e-books in the collection are in Russian and others are in English.

Please send feedback to Nick Hearn.

Late Qing and Republican Era Chinese Periodicals and Newspapers database (until 28 July 2020)

The database offers full-text access to Chinese periodical publications (academic, popular, literary, professional) from 1832-1949 covering a whole range of subjects including politics, history, law, language and literature, humanities and social sciences.

In addition to Chinese periodicals, the database offers access to archives of several major newspaper titles published in English in China before 1949, including North China Herald and the China Press, among many others.

Please send feedback to Mamtimyn Sunuodula.

Trial until 30 March: Cold War Eastern Europe, Module 1: 1953-1960

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Colleagues in the Social Science Library have arranged trial access to Cold War Eastern Europe, Module 1: 1953-1960. The trial ends 30 March 2018. It can be accessed via SOLO or OxLIP+. Please note that documents cannot be downloaded during the trial. Documents from other modules are not accessible either.

This resource provides access to over 6,800 primary source files sourced entirely from the political departments of the U.K. Foreign Office responsible for dealing with and reporting on the Soviet Union and the socialist states of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The files provide a uniquely comprehensive, English-language history of post-Stalinist Eastern Europe.

The sources are all in English.

Module I covers the years 1953 to 1960, and consists of files selected from The National Archives series FO 371 (Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906-1966) which contains the files of the Foreign Office’s Northern, Southern, Central, and Western Departments pertaining to each of the socialist states of Eastern Europe. Every file relevant to the region from 1953 to 1960 – a total of nearly 7,000 files – is included in this resource, with the exception of any files retained by the government.

In addition, the full run of FO 371 Russia Committee files dating back to 1946 – totalling 41 files –  have been included. These complete the set of FO 371 Russia Committee meeting minutes and reports dating up to 1957, and provide context to Britain’s Soviet policy in the early Cold War.

Key events featured in the files of Module I include:

  • The East German Uprising of 1953
  • Founding of the Warsaw Pact
  • The Poznań Uprising in Poland
  • The Hungarian Revolution
  • Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”
  • The onset of the Sino-Soviet Split
  • The U2 spy-plane incident

The Foreign Office, along with their embassies and consulates throughout the region, were interested in every aspect of the political, economic, cultural, social, and dissident life behind the Iron Curtain. They consequently reported on a hugely diverse range of issues, from state leadership to protest movements; agricultural output to international trade agreements; scientific progress to minority populations; religion to sporting events; and state-run media to popular culture. They also provided reports, and in some cases eye-witness accounts, on key milestones of the Cold War, such as the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’.

With coverage of every country in Eastern Europe, the resource enables comparative study of trends across the region, or in-depth analysis of individual countries. The countries featured in this resource are:

  • Albania
  • Bulgaria
  • Czechoslovakia
  • East Germany and Berlin
  • Hungary
  • Poland
  • Romania
  • Soviet Union
  • Yugoslavia

‘Northern (N): Soviet Union (Ns). Reviews of Developments in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s Death: Elections to Supreme Soviet; Comments on Election Speeches; Reports on Political Events and Meetings of the Supreme Soviet; Quarterly Reports on Soviet Policy’, in FO371: Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906-1966 (Foreign Office). [Cold War Eastern Europe, accessed 15 Feb 2018.]

The files also bear annotations relating to the administration and registry of the files which, in themselves, are hugely interesting.

You can search and browse the collections, which use tagging by country, theme, document type, language, etc. If you have a FO reference you can use it to locate specific known documents.

Please send any feedback to angelina.gibson@bodleian.ox.ac.uk by 30 March 2018.