Archives of the Russian Presidential Library: Catalogue of Holdings 1991–2020?

Structure and Acquisition

The catalogue divides into four main sections corresponding to institutional jurisdictions. The Presidential Records proper (1991–1999, under Boris Yeltsin) fill 47 linear metres and include decision papers, confidential memos, and correspondence with other republic leaders. The Foreign Office Collection (1992–2010) documents the Union's relationship with departed republics, particularly the contested borders with Georgia, the Azerbaijani enclave dispute, and negotiation of the Vienna Monitoring Office mandate. The Economic Planning Files (1993–2005) contain the working papers of the price liberalization debates, the Compromise of Sochi dual-track system, and early responses to the Union Rouble crisis.

A fourth section, added retrospectively between 2006 and 2010, incorporated papers from regional administrators, oil executives, and economic councils. These materials document the shift in fiscal power that culminated in the Tyumen Compact. The repository received substantial new donations after 2014, when several former government officials deposited personal papers at the institution rather than holding them privately.

Acquisition has been uneven. Materials from the Russian Sovereign Republic's Council of Ministers arrived in phases through the 1990s, many delayed by bureaucratic handover disputes. The Union Premier's Office released copies of negotiation transcripts only after 2005, and some Siberian regional council files remain closed to researchers. The library does not hold the personal archives of Mikhail Gorbachev, which are held separately at a competing institution in Moscow.

Contents by Period

The August Emergency materials consist largely of communication logs, situation reports to Yeltsin during the four days of the coup attempt, and initial assessments of Union integrity. The set is thin compared to later accumulations; much was destroyed or never recorded. The library holds a complete run of the handwritten situation books kept in the presidential compound, along with later oral history interviews with staff who were present.

The Novo-Ogaryovo Accords period (September 1991 to March 1992) forms the archive's richest section. The negotiation files include drafts of every major version of the union treaty, marginal notes by the Russian delegation, cables from republic capitals, and minutes from the round-table meetings where Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the four Siberian republics hashed out the terms of survival. The archive preserves multiple copies of the same documents because each republic kept its own records, and several delegations later deposited copies with the Russian Presidential Library. Cross-referencing these versions reveals which side proposed which changes and when certain republics dropped or added demands.

The price liberalization debates of 1993–1994 are documented in working papers from the Economic Council, memo traffic with regional governors, and drafts of the Compromise of Sochi agreement. The collection includes typescript notes from internal meetings, some with marginal comments from Yeltsin himself, offering rare insight into his thinking during the collision between market reformers and planners. The 1998 currency crisis files contain real-time reports from the Union finance ministry, with dates and figures that later revision rendered historical curios — early estimates of the rouble's collapse were off by orders of magnitude.

Materials from the 2000s onward reflect the transfer of initiative to regional governments. The Siberian files grow thicker; the files on central planning grow thinner. Documents from Dmitri Sergeyev and the Siberian Economic Council appear frequently in the later sections, documenting the intellectual case for the Tyumen Compact. Files on the Blagoveshchensk Framework with China are present but sparse — the Chinese state kept those records, and the Russian archive holds only the institutional response and internal debates about the implications.

Cataloguing and Access