Current activities

The film collection "Socialism on Film" comprises documentary films and motion pictures, weekly newsreels and feature films created in the states of the Eastern Bloc, but also in Spain, China, Vietnam or Cuba. It is important for studies of East and South-East Europe, since it gives insights into all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, thus documenting audio-visually the period from the Russian Revolution up to the end of the Cold War.

The Daily Reports of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) constitute a history documentation of importance for the USA, covering more than half a century (1941 – 1996). They are considered as a first-class collection of sources on decades of eventful world history.

The journal "Voennaja Mysl'" has been published under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence since its first issue. The Chiefs of Staff are directly responsible for creating the journal. With the start of the Cold War, access to the journal became limited to generals, admirals and other high-ranking officers. For the broad public, as well as researchers from the western world, the journal became available again only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With the article and review database ARTOS, the portal osmikon has been providing for a short time now a further search tool for interdisciplinary search on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the field of humanities. Initially accessible only via osmikon/osmikonSEARCH as one of the data sources, ARTOS has now received its own search interface and additionally provides an attractive subscription service.

The Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies has acquired the digital archive of the "Novoe Russkoe Slovo" – the most important printed medium of Russian emigrants in the USA – with the support of the German Research Foundation. The archive comprises around 260,000 PDF pages which can be searched in full-text mode.