(This post is by Michael Neubert, Head of the European Reading Room.)
In the European Reading Room college and graduate students often look for primary sources that they can use to support their research projects. Primary sources such as photographs, letters, and newspaper articles “provide an original source of information about an era or event.” (There is a discussion of primary sources on the Library’s Ask a Librarian FAQ page “What is a primary source?”) The European Reading Room offers a unique primary-source collection for research on the late Soviet period of the USSR, the Anatolii Zakharovich Rubinov Papers, 1968-1996, generally referred to as the Rubinov Papers.
Anatolii Rubinov was a prolific author who served as an editor and journalist for the Soviet and later Russian weekly national newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (Литературная газета). Literaturnaia gazeta was an unusual publication with a nominal focus on literary and other cultural matters, but it also discussed matters of everyday life with less censorship than found in other Soviet publications. “Literaturka,” as it was often referred to, had a broad circulation that reached 6.5 million in the 1980s.
From the late 1960s through 1990, Rubinov and several other Literaturnaia gazeta writers published articles on topics ranging from alcoholism to transportation. This broad thematic range inspired Soviet citizens to write letters to Literaturnaia gazeta describing their experiences and thoughts on what was discussed in the articles. While the Gazeta followed a fine line to avoid censorship, the letters to the newspaper were generally far wider ranging. They therefore represent a unique set of firsthand commentaries from average citizens about topics of interest at different points in the development of Soviet society, an unusual and valuable primary source for research on the USSR. Rubinov kept a selection of about 17,000 of these letters (out of an estimated half million received!) along with some ancillary materials. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he eventually chose to donate them to the Library of Congress in 2000, where they found a home in the European Reading Room.
These letters make up the bulk of the Rubinov Papers, which total 21,360 items. The remainder of the collection is made up of copies of letters from agencies to readers or from agencies to the Gazeta (1973-1990), “bulletins” that were derived from selected readers’ letters and typed up for internal use, and unedited transcripts (1971-1975) from two of many roundtable discussions organized by the newspaper.
As with most manuscript collections, the primary tool that Library staff created to assist researchers with using the collection is its finding aid, which is available online. The finding aid provides useful background information about the collection as well as a description of the contents of each of the 63 boxes that make it up. It clarifies which Gazeta article is associated with which folder of letters as well as the title and date of publication of the article that inspired them.
Although it remains to the researcher to discover the precise content of the letters, it is possible to deduce their overall themes from the titles of the articles that prompted them. For example, “Liubov’ po ob”iavleniiu” (Love through advertisement) discusses how single Soviet men and women meet the challenge of finding suitable mates by placing advertisements. But other titles are not that clear, and the organization of the finding aid for the collection does not collocate articles that are on the same or related subjects. To address this problem, one of the European Reading Room’s Russian specialists, Matthew Young, created a research guide, Rubinov Papers: A Topical Guide to Articles Referenced in the Collection, that groups articles and associated letters by sixteen different subject “buckets” including alcoholism, consumer goods and services, corruption, marriage and family, public transportation, and others. By providing a summary of the articles and the letters responding to them, the guide saves researchers time by allowing them easily to identify folders with letters on a particular subject.
Although the Rubinov Papers have had dozens of users since they were processed and made available in 2011, it remains an underutilized opportunity for understanding Soviet views on aspects of everyday life in the Soviet Union from the Brezhnev era up to the collapse of the USSR. Library staff have organized the collection and provided a useful level of subject access, leaving it to the interested researcher to read and learn from the letters in the collection. (While most of the letters are handwritten rather than typed, the typical Soviet citizen had exemplary command of Cyrillic cursive script.) Unlike other valuable and extensive collections normally found only in Russia itself, the Rubinov Papers offer a window on contemporary Soviet life freely available in Washington, D.C., to visitors at the Library of Congress.
Diane P. Koenker, emeritus professor of Russian and Soviet History and former director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London, has used the Rubinov Papers and published articles drawing in part on its materials. In assessing the Rubinov Papers she notes, “Letters to editors in the post-Stalin Soviet Union produced a vibrant and diverse set of conversations about myriad issues of daily and public life. Editors and letter-writers took them very seriously. The letters preserved in the Rubinov Collection constitute a rich and uniquely accessible repository of opinions, values, grievances, and aspirations of Soviet people from all over the country. The collection is truly a treasure trove for historians.”
Detailed information about using the collection is found in the Rubinov Papers Research Guide, and our specialists are available to provide answers to any questions you might have.