Skip to Main Content

Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies

This guide provides an introduction to the resources for the study of Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe available at Duke University Libraries.

Documentary Photography@Duke

Although the library's extensive holdings of documentary photographs are focused primarily within the collections of the Duke Documentary Photography Archive, most of the photographs having a direct bearing on Slavic and East European Studies can be found among the extensive collections of photographs, film, and other visual materials within Rubenstein Rare Book and Special Collections Library's archival collections.  Current holdings in this field include thousands of twentieth-century photographs, many (but by no means all) of which relate to life in the Soviet Union. Representative collections include:

PETRA BARTH PHOTOGRAPHS
Collection consists of 421 black-and-white prints in darkroom and inkjet formats, 726 associated digital image and project files, and two digital videos by photographer Petra Barth (b. Bavaria, Germany, 1964). Relevant collections include: 
1. Chernobyl, Ukraine, 2009-2012 (92 prints; 129 digital files)
2. Market of the Heroes, Sarajevo, 2017 July (54 prints; 188 digital files). 

WILLIAM HILLMAN SHOCKLEY, 1900-1909
Collection includes 450 images of Siberia taken by an American railway engineer at the turn of the 20th-century, including during the Russian Revolution of 1905.

NOEL-BUXTON, NOEL, BARON, 1869-1948.
This collection includes 34 photos documenting daily life (e.g. a bazaar, a hut), as well as Turkish atrocities against the South Slavs of Bosnia and Hercegovina (these images constitute about a third of the total number of photos).  There are also five photo-postcards of South Slavic generals and poilticians who were on friendly terms with Buxton. All these photos appear to have been taken around 1905-6, on a trip that Buxton took as chairman of the so-called Balkan Committee.  This collection is a perfect complement the Duke Human Rights Archive's International Monitor Institute (IMI) collection of materials about human rights violations during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

ROBERT EICHELBERGER PAPERS--Pictures Series, Box 87: Siberia, 1918-1919, n.d.
Three (3) folders (c. 1,000 items) of photographs of Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1918-1919), taken during Eichelberger's service in the American Expeditionary Force.  These photos are now available online in Duke's American in the Land of Lenin digital collection..

FRANK WHITSTON FETTER PAPERS, 1902-1922
Collection of American economist includes over 330 black-and-white photos taken during a trip to Soviet Tatarstan in 1930.These photos are now available online in Duke's American in the Land of Lenin digital collection .

JOSEPH CONRAD PAPERS, 1897-1965.
This important collection of letters by the author of The Heart of Darkness also includes an album containing 43 photographs (1860-1890) of his Polish relatives..A brief description of the collection can be found in Virginia R. Gray “Young Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski,” Library Notes,43 (November 1972), pp. 43-52.:

MERLE HOFFMAN PAPERS--Photographic Materials series--Box PH1
Two (2) folders of color photographs taken during Hoffman's 1992 trip to Moscow, which was intimately related to “Choices East,” an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to promote reproductive/abortion rights in the former Soviet Union.

MICHAEL IVANOVITCH ROSTOVTSEFF PAPERS, 1897-1968--Pictures Subseries, Box 3, folders 1 and 3.
Only a few of the hundreds of photographs in the extensive personal archive of this Russian-American archaeologist and historian contain material of interest to students of Slavic and East European studies, including the following seven (7) items: three photos of Michael and Sophie Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff at their dacha in Borisovka, Ukraine (c. 1908/9); two photos of pre-revolutionary Ukrainian churches; and two of his students in Riga during a seminar on Russian literature and his colleagues in Poland during an unspecified ceremonial dinner, "presided" over by a bust of Russia's national poet, A. S. Pushkin.

KEYSTONE VIEW COMPANY STEREOGRAPHS, 1892-1930
Two (2) scenes of everyday life from nineteenth-century Russia, produced commercially by the Keystone View Company, mass publishers and distributers of stereographic views.

JUANITA MORRIS KREPS PAPERS--Box 45--"Beige" album
Juanita Kreps (1921-2010), was Professor of Economics at Duke University (1958-1977),  Collection includes 2 albums of black-and-white photographs of Krep's visit to Communist Poland (1977 and undated). 

HENRY DUNSTER BAKER PAPERS--Scrapbook, 1911-1933.
Three (3) black-and-white photos: two showing the arrival in Tarbiz (Persia) of a Russian railroad train from Transcaucasia, the subject of Baker's article in the 1918 issue of National Geographic; and one with Baker’s official portrait, made sometime between 1914-1918 by a Russian photographer during Baker’s stint as cultural attaché to Russia. 

TIBOR SCITOVSKY PAPERS, 1925-2002.
The personal file of this Hungarian-American Stanford University economist contains a series of photographs that serve as companions to Scitovsky's unpublished memoirs.  The photos depict life in northern Hungary for a family of nobility, particularly before and during World War II. The memoirs also offer a detailed narrative of Scivovsky’s emigration from Hungary to the United States in the 1940s, as well as an account of the student protests in Paris in the 1960s.