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This page provides links to English-language resources for teaching Cold War Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia. A few key secondary sources are provided on the “general resources” page, but most links below are to assignments that require students to engage a range of online archives to explore the various events and phases of the Cold War. A list of English-language memoirs is also provided, along with a suggested assignment. Note: Many of the resources can also be used to teach the history of the USSR, but it is not the focus of this guide.

Cold War Online Archive Assignments

Background Image: Prague Spring 1968, demonstration in front of the National Assembly, Prague, Czechoslovakia, March 1968. Alamy / Interfoto.

About This Site

The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin Libraries has been working on this digitization project since 2014. Our curated digitized collection of Cold War archives includes the Country Files for Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania from the National Security Files (NSF) collection from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library's archival collections. We will continue adding new content, including the country files for Hungary, Bulgaria, and the USSR, which are coming soon. Contributors to the creation of this website and the digitized collection include Dr. Mary Neuburger (director of the project), Ian Goodale, Dr. Tetiana Klynina, Alayna Parlevleit, Nick Pierce, Eliza Fisher, Sarth Khare, Nilcole Marino, Mary Rader, Esmeralda Moscatelli and students from the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies program at UT Austin. Images used on the site are sourced from the LBJ Presidential Library's online photo archive, Wikimedia Commons, and other sources as noted. The background collages on the main page and the country pages are mostly from the English-language Communist-era glossy magazines produced in the region, now housed in the UT Libraries and Dr. Neuburger's private collection.

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Home page image: Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin informs President Lyndon B. Johnson of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to crush the Prague Spring reformist movement. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

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