Welcome to the New Resource Roundup, a series dedicated to highlighting Falvey’s new databases and acquisitions that help make you an excellent researcher, student, and citizen!

By Jutta Seibert, Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement

Moscow News, October 5, 1930, title page.

The Library just added the complete archive of The Moscow News to its collection. The Moscow News was founded in 1930 by American socialist Anna Louise Strong as an international newspaper with Communist party support. Its mission was the dissemination of socialist ideas to an international audience. To increase its reach, it was also published at various times in numerous other languages including French, German, Spanish, and Arabic.

Following the Great Purge the Communist Party took control of The Moscow News in 1956. The paper began advocating for social and political change in the eighties but eventually ceased publication in 2014. One of its last owners was the well-known oligarch and later political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Published for 84 years it was the longest running English-language newspaper in Russia. Anna Arutunyan’s “A Paper of Pioneers and Purges” (The Moscow News, April 24, 2009, pp. 1-3) is the first of three articles that explore the history of the paper.

Moscow News, April 24-30, 2009, title page.

Anna Louise Strong was a frequent contributor to The Moscow News in its first decade, writing on topics as varied as credit reform, marriage, the new Russian woman, foreign visitors to Moscow, and cultural life in the U.S.S.R. in general. She continued to contribute to The Moscow News for a short time after she had left the U.S.S.R. in 1936, eventually settling in China. Strong’s memoir I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American (1937) is available in the Falvey collection.

The digital archive of The Moscow News (1930-2014) includes all available issues as well as those of its short-lived sister publication, the Moscow Daily News (1932-1938). East View, the publisher, includes a curriculum guide with convenient access points to selected articles.

Moscow News, September 19, 1935, title page.

Related archives available to the Villanova community include the Current Digest of the Russian Press (East View, 1949-present) and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports (Readex, 1974-1996). The Current Digest is a compendium of selected Russian language press materials translated into English.

Coverage goes back to 1949 and includes translated news from important news sources, including Izvestia and Pravda. FBIS features translations of foreign radio and television broadcasts as well as foreign newspapers, periodical articles, and government statements selected by the C.I.A. for distribution to U.S. policymakers and security analysts.