This exhibition of documents, photographs, posters, books, and audiovisual materials from the collections of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives illustrates the various aspects of the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union from the 1960s onward.

The Hoover Institution Library contains a small (some five hundred titles) but significant collection of books and periodicals on Russian art, architecture, and culture, most of which were purchased by Professor Frank A. Golder in 1925 during one of his collecting trips to the Soviet Union.

The exhibit is in the Rotunda of the Hoover Tower. Hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibit is free of charge.

This exhibit celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe's first full schedule of broadcasting to Czechoslovakia in 1951. Four additional radio services quickly followed: to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Radio Liberty began broadcasting to the Soviet Union in 1953. The purpose of the Radios was the same: to provide a free press for the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe where the media were controlled by totalitarian governments.

In conjunction with the centenary of the Russian revolution of 1905, an international conference, "Jews and Russian Revolutions," is being held at Stanford during November 6-7, 2005.

In twentieth-century Russian literature Boris Pasternak stands out as a great metaphysical poet, as evidenced by his verse collection My Sister, Life, written during the revolutionary years.

Writing and violence, seduction and revolution, humanity and raw power are at the core of the spare and brilliant legacy of Isaac Babel, a Russian Jewish master of the short story, who began his career with the blessing of Maxim Gorky in 1916, rose to international renown with the publication of his Red Cavalry in 1926, and perished after Stalin waved his executioner’s wand in 1940.

In May 2004, in the largest round of expansion in European Union history, ten countries will become new EU members, among them the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Thus, thirteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the regaining of independence for the Baltic countries in 1991, they will officially join Europe, although many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians feel that they never left Europe in the first place.

The Hoover Archive is opening today an exhibition on Visuality, Corporeality and Literacy in the Culture of Modernity in collaboration with the Stanford Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures that will be on display from May 8 - August 30 of 2003 in its Exhibit Pavilion at Stanford.

On June 26, 1921, the newspaper Pravda reported that a famine was raging in the Volga area, one even worse than the terrible famine of 1891, which had been witnessed by a young Marxist lawyer named Vladimir Ulyanov. His view at that time was that the proper role for a revolutionary socialist was not to engage in famine relief but to organize the destruction of the system that bred famines.

The exhibit Remembering Joseph Brodsky: 1940–1996 continues in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion. It includes books (many of which are special editions), manuscripts, and photographs, some never before published.

This exhibit, organized on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe's first full schedule of broadcasting to Czechoslovakia in 1951, covers the history of the radios and some of the broad themes in the Radios' programming over the years.

The Collapse of Communism and the Transition to Democracy

Rare letters, diaries, photographs, and artifacts of Imperial Russia.

At the core of this exhibit are the many unpublished letters that poet and novelist Boris Pasternak wrote to various family members during the 1920's and 1930s, a collection recently acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives. Portrait: Pasternak in the 1920's Many of the ideas expressed in these letters were later incorporated into passages of Dr. Zhivago. In addition to letters are rare editions of his poetry, so loved that they were copied by hand and passed from friend to friend when publication was difficult; sketchbooks of his father, Leonid Pasternak, the well-known Russian impressionist painter; and other materials from the rich cultural life of Russian émigrés of the period.