Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.
In 1996 the Department of Defense initiated the Open House Program that provided documents on hundreds of microfilm reels from the military archives from Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
After WWII what became known as Eastern European countries fell under the Soviet sphere of interest, and until Stalin's death in 1953, for several years they were forced to invest heavily in their military. Hungary and Romania also had to pay reparations and provide goods and services for the Soviet troops. The Soviet leaders that followed after Stalin's death were less worried about a war with Yugoslavia or with Western Europe, so the pressure to invest in the military quite so much of the countries' resources eased. In 1955 West Germany joined NATO, and as a reaction to that alliance the Soviet leaders decided to create the Warsaw Pact to bring Eastern European countries into a military alliance too. In 1956 the Hungarian revolution was crushed by the Soviet forces stationed in Hungary, as the Hungarian armed forces worked with the newly established government, and did not turn against the people. In 1968 the Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the revolution there, though most of the fighting was done by the Soviet troops. From the 1960s on the Soviet military doctrine started to focus more on the use of nuclear weapons and less on amassing troops in Eastern European countries that they considered to be a buffer zone in case of an attack from the West. Warsaw pact countries took part in joint military exercises in which nuclear arsenal was moved around too.
Military records form these countries were not available to researchers during the Cold War, or for years after it ended. In the late 1990s a selection of declassified documents were made available for researchers to use in the European Reading Room of the Library of Congress. The records in these collections were selected together by the U.S. Department of Defense and the archives of these countries, and they are now all declassified.
This guide provides:
This guide introduces primary documents in the Manuscript Division related to the Cold War (1947-1991) and describes related resources.
This guide highlights collections that are strong for coverage of events and individuals relating to international and diplomatic struggles between 1946 -1991 with an emphasis on rights-free images. Search tips and related resources are also covered.
The Comintern operated from 1919-1943 to foment world revolution. This guide describes a project to make metadata and materials from the Russian State Archives for Social and Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow available at the Library of Congress.
This guide brings together both online and print resources that contain documents created by the U.S. federal government along with related research tools. Includes a section on declassified documents.
VHP collects, preserves, and makes accessible the firsthand narratives of U.S. military veterans who served from World War I through the present. This guide provides an overview and tips for navigating, locating, and accessing these collections.
This guide is a compilation of Library of Congress holdings of Stars and Stripes newspaper editions, as well as books in the Library's collection that discuss the newspaper and the journalists who accompanied U.S. forces into battle.
