The Russian Military Studies Archive is a large collection of Russian-related material in a range of formats and languages, established to support research in a wide range of military topics, both historical and current. It is managed by Cranfield University’s Barrington Library on behalf of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.
The majority of the material is in English or Russian, but there is also a considerable amount of material in other languages including Czech, Polish, German, Romanian and Albanian, as well as original language source material from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
The Archive houses over 16,000 individual books, some of which are rare, and in the case of much of the Russian-language material, especially works published pre-1980, very difficult or very expensive to obtain now.
The collection contains material such as BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Foreign Broadcast Information Service Reports, RAND papers, Soviet Army Studies Papers and many journals including:
- 30 years’ worth of the USSR’s/Russia’s main military medical journal Voenno-meditsinskiy zhurnal
- 40 years of the Soviet/Russian Navy’s journal Morskoi Sbornik
- Over 30 years of the Soviet/ Russian Ground Forces journal Voenniy Vestnik and the Soviet Air Force main monthly Aviatsiya I Kosmonavtika
Amongst the maps is a very rare collection of former Soviet General Staff maps of the USSR, produced on the eve of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941. However, the bulk of the maps are Soviet/Russian/English maps of the various constituent republics of the USSR/CIS/Russian Federation, Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Near and Far East, etc.