Yale Press Awarded $1.3 Million Grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Yale University Press is pleased to announce that it has received a $1.3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a digital documentary edition of Stalin's Personal Archive.

The digitization of Stalin's Personal Archive is a new initiative of Yale University Press's acclaimed Annals of Communism series, begun in 1992.  The digitized documents from this archive will become the basis for future scholarly research, while expediting traditional book publications on topics of great importance in understanding Soviet and twentieth-century world history.  Scholars worldwide will be able to investigate the rare primary source materials and documents contained in this archive without having to travel to Moscow where the archive is held and will be able to communicate their findings instantaneously online. The archive contains significant new materials relating to Stalin's political life and death:  documents concerning foreign policy with Germany before World War II; Stalin's communications with Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKDV during the Great Purges; Stalin's directives to the Politburo after World War II; material illuminating his relations with Western intellectuals and political leaders, including Franklin D. Roosevelt; and his private notations concerning Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Soviet leaders. It also contains inestimably important materials from Stalin's library.

The Press also intends to enable transcription, translation, and scholarly annotation of these materials to be done online by Press authors and researchers using a specially designed publishing platform. To ensure the continued high scholarly credibility of the project, the approval process for the Digital Stalin Archive will be as rigorous as for volumes published in the Annals of Communism series and will be conducted in the same manner: vetting will be done by the Scholarly Editorial Committee for the Annals of Communism series, through Yale University Press's own scholarly review procedure, and by the Executive Editor for Annals of Communism.  Once approved, the fully transcribed, translated, and annotated documents will be published online. The Press envisions that online availability will occur gradually over the period of the project. A fully digitized version of all documents contained within this archive should be available to scholars via the World Wide Web by 2012.

John Donatich, Director, Yale University Press, said, "Taken together, these materials will provide the last great missing piece in understanding the engine of Soviet influence in the twentieth century—Stalin and his legacy. The digitization of Stalin's Personal Archive will facilitate important new research in Soviet studies as well as the creation of a living, growing, and continually evolving body of scholarship that will take advantage of new innovation and technologies."

To learn more about the Mellon Foundation grant to digitize the Stalin Archive, please contact Heather D'Auria, Publicity Director, at 203.432.8193 or heather.dauria@yale.edu.