Stalin Digital Archive

The Stalin Digital Archive (SDA) is planned to encompass almost 400,000 pages of unpublished materials from the archives of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a central figure in Soviet and 20th-century world events. Items selected include personal correspondence, memoranda, log books, and internal reports. It also will include 25 monographs from the Annals of Communism (AOC) series from Yale University Press, providing translations of several hundred primary source documents, which will be presented in cross-searchable e-book format.

SDA is a result of collaboration between the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (“RGASPI,” formerly the Archive of Marxism-Leninism), and Yale University Press to create an electronic database of finding aids, digitized documents and images, and materials from the recently declassified Stalin archive in the RGASPI holdings. This web-based archive of primary and secondary sources will make available documents that previously could only be consulted on site at the RGASPI in Moscow. Digital versions of Yale’s AOC series supplement the RGASPI collection with scholarly commentary on selected documents concerning the history of Soviet and international communism from Russian state and party archives spanning the 75-year history of the Communist Party.

The collection highlights aspects of the dictator's political life, including:

• USSR foreign policy and relations Germany before World War II
• communications between Stalin and the NKVD head during the Great Purges
• directives from Stalin to the Politburo outlining post-WWII Soviet strategies
• personal correspondence between Stalin and Western intellectuals and political leaders
• private notations about Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Soviet leaders.

The complete wartime correspondence between Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is also in the archive, as are Stalin's letters to and from intellectuals in the United States, England, France, Germany, and Italy.

While the original Stalin Archive at RGASPI (Fond 558) consists of approximately 40,000 documents, the digital collection curated by Yale totals around 28,000 documents and excludes any material—for instance, obituaries, gifts, greeting cards, etc.—with little or no intrinsic scholarly value. Digitization focused instead on documents pertinent to Stalin’s biography, his work in government, and his conduct of foreign affairs. Notable examples include:

• Opis 1: documents written by Stalin from 1889 to 1952
• Opis 2: documents written by Stalin from 1911 to 1944
• Opis 3: more than 300 books from Stalin’s personal library, some annotated in margins
• Opis 4: Stalin’s biographical materials, and
• Opis 11: Stalin’s correspondence from 1917 to 1952, plus 188 maps with Stalin's own handwritten markings.

Update: As of July 31, 2013, YUP had loaded 99% of the expected content, covering nearly 29,500 RGASPI records.

Annals of Communism Series

See Appendix A for a complete list of AOC titles.

Transcriptions and translations

The database will contain a mixture of documents in Russian (majority of the content) and English. While the documents published in AOC have been translated into English, documents scanned directly from RGASPI are presented as page images in the original Russian. Eventually the database will also include some transcriptions, and "the SDA Editorial Team is in the process of translating a portion of these [selected] documents into English." Users are invited to prioritize documents for translation, or even submit translations themselves, which will then become the property of Yale University Press.  The publishers have indicated that approximately 2500 of the RGASPI documents will have transcriptions text searchable in Russian, while an estimated 250 selected documents "of particular importance" will also be translated and text searchable in English.

Update: as of July 31, 2013, the editorial board was still in the process of selecting documents for transcription.

Issues and questions addressed

The following original critiques have been addressed or acknowledged; updated information is noted here or where appropriate in the review.

• Questions on whether content from other archival files and unpublished material gathered for the Yale series will ever be added. Answer: "That is something YUP would like to do, although there are no firm plans at this time."
• Questions about whether a standard system has been applied to transliterated (Romanized) forms of names. Criticism during the early launch stage of the inconsistent application of the publishers' cited modification of the Library of Congress system: Yale University Press acknowledged that transliterated metadata was initially mounted without final editing and corrections. Criticism of the lack of name authority control. Answer: It does not appear that all variant name forms have been reconciled. "Editorial staff have gone through the name metadata to identify duplicates; more extensive editorial work may happen in the future."
• Numerous concerns about the original requirement for user registration to view documents. Also concerns about the earlier restriction on downloading copies of the documents for use elsewhere. "A researcher can't work with the documents at all unless he/she is connected to the Internet and logged in to the site. [Whereas] most archives will make photocopies of [original] documents for researchers on-site for a fee."  Answer: users are no longer required to set up a MySDA account just to view documents, and documents can be downloaded without logging into a MySDA account or folders.