HISTORY 495S/496S: Honors Thesis Seminar 2024/25

Erik Zitser Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies ernest.zitser@duke.edu

• Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies

• U.S. Declassified Documents Online includes primary sources and previously classified government documents relevant to US domestic and foreign policy (from the State Department, Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, UN, National Security Council, and other executive agencies).
• Project Muse (current) and JSTOR (historical issues) are two separate, full-text collections of core scholarly journals in all fields, covering the Slavic-related arts and humanities, social science, and mathematics.
• PAIS International covers of a wide variety of international sources including journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, conference papers, and 'grey literature' (eg. research reports produced by think tanks; for the most current reports, consult the websites of the individual think-tanks, such as RAND Corp., Brookings Institution, or CSIS) .

• Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) Russian Broadcast Recordings (Open Society Archives) The collection contains 26,147 unique audio files (over 10 thousand hours of recordings) that were produced and broadcast by RFE/RL’s Russian Service for over four decades (1953-1995). The “broadcast archive” includes various “genres” of Radio Svoboda: “newsreels and special broadcasts; talk shows written and edited by famous writers, poets, musicians, historians and analysts; literary readings by authors or actors and radio plays; samizdat reviews; liturgies and talks by Orthodox Church reverends; music programs, interviews and press-conferences with fresh emigrants."

• Published Samizdat Sound Recordings, Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) (Open Society Archive) The collection contains 58 unique audio files (in Russian, English, German, Latvian, Lithuanian) that were produced and/or broadcast by RFE/RL’s Russian Service between 1970 and 1989. The nearly 18 hours of sound recordings include “telephone conversations between RFE/RL staff in Europe and the US, and opposition members in the USSR.” The online audio files complement RFE/RL’s analog collections of Published Samizdat (1964-1992) and Samizdat Archives (1956-1994), which can only be accessed onsite in the Archival Research Room of the OSA.

• Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Wilson Center Digital Archive) collection includes declassified documents pertaining to RFE and RL

• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Sound Recordings (Hoover Institution Archives) digital collection of over 7,000 audio recordings (1950-2005) produced by/about RFE/RL between includes:

  • Broadcast Records include nearly 7,000 sound recordings of radio broadcasts (1950-2005) to audiences in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by RFE/RL’s various country bureaus.

  • Corporate Records include 161 sound recordings (1951-2005), including a few interviews in various languages, Bulgarian (7), Czech (5), Hungarian (4), etc. For a description of the programming, consult the guide to the collection. The Public Affairs photographic file includes 21 prints and negatives depicting people and events associated with RFE/RL, Inc. and the history of Cold War radio broadcasting (1950-1980).

• Memorial Human Rights Center

  • Хроника текущих событий  The online edition of Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1983), a type-written, informational bulletin, self-published (samizdat) by Soviet human rights activists.

  • Among the 2000 periodicals in Memorial's "Collection of socio-political documents" (1985-1999) are several digitized newspapers from the late- and early post-Soviet period.

To find books on the topic, conduct a "subject" search in the library's online catalog for the following Library of Congress-defined subject headings and limit the results by language (e.g. English):

Human rights -- Soviet Union
Civil rights -- Soviet Union
Freedom of religion -- Soviet Union.
Civil rights workers -- Soviet Union
Dissenters -- Soviet Union -- Biography
Jews -- Persecutions -- Soviet Union.

Chalidze, Valeriĭ, 1938-2018.
Alekseeva, Li︠u︡dmila, 1927-2018.

Obshchestvennai͡a gruppa sodeĭstvii͡a vypolnenii͡u Khelʹsinkskikh soglasheniĭ v SSSR
Komitet prav cheloveka

To expand your search outside of Duke library, conduct the same "subject" search in the union catalogs of TRLN and WorldCat.

• Historical Abstracts provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages. Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Date Coverage: 1955 - present.
• American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies includes citations for articles published in North America from 1990 to the present; coverage back to 1956 available in hard copy in Perkins Reference.
• Eastview Databases -- unified search engine for Russian Central Newspapers and Social Sciences & Humanities publications, The Current Digest of the Soviet/Post-Soviet Press, as well as full-runs of Moscow News, Pravda, Izvestiia, Voprosy istorii, and Voprosy literatury.