Current activities

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.

Recently, access has been enabled for researchers in Germany and at German institutes abroad to the digitized archive of the weekly journal "Moscow News" (1930 – 2014) and its short-lived sister publication "Moscow Daily News" (1932 – 1938). The source collection has been licensed by the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies with the support of the German Research Foundation.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek complements its renowned collection by two very rare works of the Czech artist Josef Váchal (1884 – 1969): "Ďáblova zahrádka, aneb přírodopis strašidel" ("The devil's garden, or the natural history of spirits") of the year 1924 and "Šumava umírající a romantická" ("Bohemian Forest dying and romantical") of 1931. The two impressive, leather-bound folio volumes are illustrated with exquisite coloured wood engravings and rank among the absolute masterpieces of Czech modern art between the two world wars.