A tranche of funding from the UKRI and other sources earlier this year has allowed Cambridge University Libraries to buy large amounts of electronic material that had been flagged for purchase but had not previously been feasible for us to buy.  This blog post looks at Ukraine in some of these resources (but you can also see a summary of all the resources available here: https://ejournalscambridge.wordpress.com/2023/05/03/new-data-rich-research-resources-for-cambridge-in-2023/).

There are three obvious candidates to search for Ukraine and Ukrainian material in amongst these new purchases:

• Russian Anarchist periodicals of the early 20th century (Brill)
• Soviet Woman Digital Archive (1945-1991) (East View)
• Soviet Cinema Online. Archival Documents from RGALI, 1923-1935 (Brill)

Scratching the surface of any resource with the word “Soviet” to find resources beyond Russia is pretty obvious.  The term “Russian” for anything before and around the 1917 October Revolution can also be a similar catch-all, referring often to the vast territory of the Russian Empire rather than necessarily only to the area of post-imperial Russia.

Three of the periodicals in the Brill Russian Anarchist periodicals of the early 20th century backfile are russophone papers published in Ukraine, two in Kharkiv and one in Kyiv.

• Khli͡eb i voli͡a : organ Federat͡sīi anarkhistov g. Kharʹkova (Bread and freedom : organ of the Federation of Anarchists of Kharkiv)
• Rabochai͡a myslʹ : organ Kharʹkovskoĭ gruppy anarkho-sindikalistov-kommunistov (Working thought : organ of the Kharkiv Group of Anarchists-Syndicalists-Communists)
• Svoboda vnutri nas : organ Kīevskoĭ assot͡sīat͡sīi svobodnykh anarkhistov (Freedom within us : organ of the Kyiv Association of Free Anarchists)

(Readers can also see a list of books we have about Ukraine’s most famous anarchist, Nestor Makhno, by clicking here.)

The Soviet woman journal backfile was trialled in Cambridge in early 2021 and explored in a blog post at that point.  The trial was popular but purchase was not within financial scope until this year.  While the two Brill resources are a little hard to search, since the digitised copies they provide are images that have not been treated to allow the displayed text to be searchable, the more modern Soviet woman backfile from East View is fully searchable.  Searching within the journal for Ukrain* (the asterisk at the end allowing for Ukraine, Ukrainian, etc) brings up 1,370 results.  I’ve provided a sample screenshot, from 1946.  As a journal produced to tell non-Soviets about Soviet women and their lives, it does of course represent things in a carefully positive light.

The last, Soviet Cinema Online. Archival Documents from RGALI, 1923-1935, is very centralised and broad on first glance, with only one document referring specifically to Ukrainian film-making (the ‘Explanatory note for the control codes from the Vseukrainskoe fotokinoupravlenie five-year plan (1927/1928 – 1932/1933)’).  This SovKino archive will, though, have more to offer in its details (eg in the lists of banned/allowed foreign and Soviet films) for those with an interest in the extraordinary Ukrainian film-making scene of the time.

Mel Bach