From the first newspapers established by Peter the Great to the fall of the Romanovs, the Imperial Russian Newspapers collection chronicles 189 years of Russian history. From Peter the Great’s founding of the Russian empire, through the empire’s expansion during Catherine the Great, the abolishment of serfdom by Alexander II, the tumultuous years of Nicholas II, and everything in between.
The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection comprises out-of-copyright newspapers spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. With no less than 500,000 pages, the collection’s core titles are from Moscow and St. Petersburg, complemented by regional newspapers across the vast Russian Empire.
The collection also includes two e‑book editions (full-text searchable) of pertinent reference books: an in-depth bibliographic record of all known newspapers published in Imperial Russia (over 10 key bibliographies) and a unique collection of dozens of contemporaneous (mostly nineteenth century) reference works offering detailed subject bibliographies of the articles appearing in the specific newspapers of the Imperial Russian Newspapers collection.
The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection was facilitated by the outstanding bibliographic work done by librarians and scholars in major Russian libraries, primarily the National Library of Russia’s Newspaper Division, which is one of the largest newspaper libraries in the world.
The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection was made possible thanks to the active support of the National Library of Russia. Open Access to this collection is made possible through the generous support of the Center for Research Libraries and its member institutions.