The material in the Russian collections at the IISH comes primarily from the papers of émigrés. First, the archives of the revolutionary populists of the 1870s (Alexander Herzen, Petr Lavrov, Valerian Smirnov) came into existence during their expatriation. The same holds true for the second category: archives of world-famous anarchists who were born in Russia, such as Michail Bakunin, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Senya Flechine.
The third group of materials, which concern social democracy, also comes from émigrés. In addition to Pavel Aksel'rod's vast collection of personal papers, there are smaller collections of Georgij Plechanov and Aleksandr Potresov, who together with Vladimir Lenin, Vera Zasulič, and Julij Martov strove to introduce social democracy in Russia. After the Revolution of 1917 the social democratic movement created new archives on a more modest scale. From the late 1920s onward, material from Trotsky and his movement increased. Most of these archives reached the Institute well before World War II. After 1945, personal papers of Russian émigrés continued to be acquired, such as those of the anarchist Ida Lazarevic, as well as the major archive of the Association pour la Conservation des Valeurs Culturelles Russes from Paris.
Even archives emigrate. The archive of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party PSR, by far the largest and most illustrious organization archive in the Russian collection, reached the IISH (presumably via Paris, Prague, and Belgrade) in 1938 and 'survived' the war in Great Britain. The historian Boris Nikolaevskij (1887-1966) helped the IISH acquire many of these archives. He was a collaborator of the Institute from the start in 1935. As an exile, he had previously worked in Berlin as the academic correspondent of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
After a period of stiff competition between this IML and the IISH in the 1930s and strained relations during the Cold War, the IISH and 'Moscow' (the Central Party Archive within the former Institute for Marxism-Leninism was known as the RCChIDNI from 1991 and as the RGASPI from 1999) established an amicable relationship in the early 1990s. As a consequence, the IISH now has microfilm copies from the archive of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDAP) and the editorial archives of the RSDAP newspapers Iskra and Social-Demokrat, as well as a lot of other materials.
Since the early 1990s the IISH has worked closely with Russian grass-roots initiatives to collect archives and gather documentation. The Institute has obtained copies of the Memorial and Vozvraščenie archives, comprising thousands of files filled with memoirs, surveys, literary statements and biographical data about victims of Stalinist terror. Finally, the archive of the Alexander Herzen Foundation (a Dutch initiative from the 1970s to publish the writings of dissidents in the West) contains a wealth of data from and about the samizdat and correspondence with Russian authors.
ArcheoBibliobase provides information on all archival holdings in Russia and the former Soviet Union.