On May 21, 2020, the Federal Archival Agency of Russia opened online access to a comprehensive collection of archive documents, newsreels and photo reports devoted to the Second World War. Over 1,700 documents from the main archive as well as different state agency archives are now open for public, including Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Archive, the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and the Russian State Military Archive.
The collection contains, among others, documents of Soviet military and foreign intelligence (featuring reports, dispatches and messages from agents, translations of documents received from spies, intelligence information sheets), cryptograms, memos by Soviet diplomats, material captured from French and German secret services. Half of the documents are published for the first time. The collection covers the timeframe from 1933 till September 1939.
The publication is only the first stage of a larger Internet project titled World War II in Archival Documents, carried out by the Federal Archival Agency in co-operation with the Russian Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense, Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service under Clause 4 “к” of the List of Instructions regarding the realization of the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of January 15, 2020. No. Pr-113.
Digital versions of documents are now in the process of being uploaded to the information servers of Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation. The material can be found under THIS LINK.
