The Library of Congress has been collecting publications from Russia for over 160 years and has amassed one of the finest such collections in North America. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of history, literature, economics, law, and the political and cultural life of the Russian people, but there are Russian and Russian-related materials on every subject throughout the general and special collections.

The intent of the guide is to provide an overview of the collections from and about Russia in the Library of Congress to enable a researcher to assess if a visit to the Library will be necessary to undertake research. With descriptions of various genres of publications, as well as a bit of history of the development of the collections, the guide covers collection materials across all reading rooms and internal divisions of the Library, including our digital collections.

Statistics on the extent of the Library of Congress Russian collection are estimates due to the sheer size of the collection and the differing standards of bibliographic records over the decades. In the collection there are over 840,000 titles in the Russian language published in Russia and many other countries of the world, with an additional 30,000 titles published in Russia in non-Russian languages. Periodicals in Russian or from Russia number close to 35,000 titles. Including works about Russia in English and other non-Russian languages, we believe the size of the collection is approaching 1 million titles.

We can date precisely when the acquisition of the first Russian book in the collection occurred- May 1815, for that is when the Library of Congress acquired the collection of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had three titles in Russian and three titles in French which were published in Russia, plus an additional 14 titles about Russia. For more details on the early development of the Russian collection, including the Jefferson Library, see the page in this guide Origins of the Russian Collections (1800-1906). The Library of Congress did not intentionally collect Russian materials until 1866 when the Smithsonian Institution deposited with the Library thousands of volumes of scholarly materials, including 96 titles from Russia. These materials had been gathered via international exchanges. After the initial deposit, the Smithsonian began to act as the Library's exchange agent, a role it continued to fulfill for decades. In this way the Russian collections began to grow, very slowly, acquiring scholarly and government publications, supplemented by small, highly selective purchases. The accumulation of materials in English about Russia increased as the Copyright law of 1870 requiring deposit of U.S. publications took effect.

By the end of the 19th century, the Russian collections were still quite modest, but in 1906 that changed dramatically with the purchase of 80,000 volumes of the Yudin collection. In one fell swoop the Library of Congress became a major resource in North America for the study of the Russian Empire. The Siberian bibliophile Gennadii Yudin had amassed an impressive collection of Russian books, journals, newspapers and other materials spanning more than five centuries of Russian publishing. His collection constitutes the early backbone of the Library of Congress Russian collections, with long runs of 19th century journals and books on Russian history and culture.

To process the Yudin collection a Slavic Division was established in 1907, which over the course of the 20th century morphed into the two separate units that exist today - the ABA Russia team with responsibilities for acquisitions and cataloging, and the European Reading Room with reference and collection development duties. After 1917 and through the early 1940s the Library collected Russian materials to some extent, making purchases of contemporary publications on history, literature, and culture. Exchanges with Soviet libraries also brought in some content, as did transfers of materials from other federal institutions and gifts from private individuals, all of which supplemented the limited purchasing. Although the collection was growing, the acquisitions were not systematic or large-scale. Some very special additions also occurred in the interwar period such as the purchase of materials from the Imperial Palaces and the acquisitions of a large collection of Russian Civil War era newspapers.

Large-scale exchanges and purchases began only in the 1940s after the recognition of the importance of strong international collections to academia and the federal government in light of recent wars and the impending Cold War. The new acquisitions procedures provided not only a majority of the Russian publishing output of titles of research value, but also enabled large retrospective acquisitions of materials dating back even into the eighteenth century. Gaps in journal runs were filled and many more newspapers began to be collected systematically. Publications from the Soviet era emerged as a major collection strength along with 19th century publications. Strong, comprehensive collecting of scholarly and current events materials begun during the communist era continued into the post-Soviet period to this day with the Library maintaining both exchanges and approval plans for Russian publications and acquiring approximately 14,000 pieces per annum, of which about 6,500 are books. The recent political situation has put some channels of acquisition on temporary hold, but the Library continues to purchase materials, process gifts and acquire electronic content.