ABSTRACT
This chapter will take an overview of the sources available for the study of modern Russian history, placing the changing nature of sources firmly in historical context. The chapter will discuss the formidable printed collections of source material prepared before 1917 by, for example, the Imperial Russian Historical Society, and will then examine the ways in which the new Soviet regime after 1917 sought to use historical sources to present its own view of Russia’s history through, for example, the journal Krasnyi Arkhiv (Red Archive) and later collections of published documentary material.
The chapter will analyse the ways in which access to sources in Soviet archives and libraries was controlled by the regime, and the impact that this had on the writing of history both inside the USSR and beyond its borders. The nature of collections of material relating to Russian and the Soviet Union available in repositories outside the USSR and the opportunities that they offered in the writing of history will also be discussed. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 revolutionized access to archival sources inside the former Soviet states and the chapter will conclude by discussing how this archival revolution has affected the writing and re-writing of history and reflect on the wider issues about the relationship between sources and the presentation of the past.
