The National Endowment for the Humanities will provide a grant of $287,440 to support an innovative collaborative project in which the Hoover Institution archivists and preservation staff will work with the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco to produce microfilm copies of the museum’s most significant holdings of Russian émigré papers.
Two years will be spent developing modern finding aids to the émigré collections. Scholars will then be able to access the materials in the reading room of the Hoover Institution Archives.
A preservation master microfilm, produced according to the highest conservation standards, will ensure that the content of these crumbling treasures be saved for future research. An on-line biographical database of important émigré figures will be available to the international scholarly community and to Russians both at home and abroad.
For more than fifty years the Museum of Russian Culture has collected the papers of prominent émigrés, especially those who traveled eastward in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Settling first in China, those émigrés moved to the United States in the aftermath of World War II and the communist takeover of China.
The millions of émigrés who left Soviet Russia after the 1917 revolution preserved meaningful elements of a culture that was systematically dismantled in their native land. Until recently the museum was primarily concerned with collecting and saving the vast literature created by these often highly educated émigrés during their flight, first from the Bolsheviks and then from the Chinese Communists.
Recently, with the transformation of the Soviet Union into a freer society, the museum president, Dmitri Brauns, and the museum vice president, Yuri Tarala, have turned to the task of gaining intellectual control over the materials so that the information can be shared with scholars around the globe.
"The mass migration of political refugees has been a major feature of modern history," according to Hoover archivist Elena Danielson, who is supervising the work. "The American Historical Association has designated migration as a topic that warrants intensified research. We have yet to measure the impact on Soviet Russia of the loss of large numbers of well-educated professionals in the emigration."
The museum’s archival collections contain unique material from the final period of Romanov rule, with memoirs capturing the details of prerevolutionary life and culture. Diplomatic and military files trace the battles of the Russian civil war and the provisional governments established in Siberia. Documents from the Chinese Eastern Railroad in Manchuria focus on the complex interconnections of Russian, Chinese, and Japanese history from the turn of the century through World War II.
The émigrés also donated much evidence about the Soviet system of forced labor camps.
