Russia is the primary focus of the UW Libraries’ Slavic and East European collections.  Over 230,000 books, 5,500 periodicals, and thousands of microfilm titles within the collections pertain to or were published in Russia or the former Soviet Union.  Each year, some 2,500 new books and current issues of over 800 periodicals and newspapers from or about Russia are received and processed.   A wide range of contemporary Russian newspapers—electronic, in print, and on microfilm—and a comprehensive collection of 20th-century Russian literary journals are just two of the collection’s many distinguishing features.

Subject areas of greatest strength are Russian literature, language studies, and history and politics, but there are broad and deep holdings in many other fields, as well—including Russian economic and social conditions, visual arts, theater, cinema, philosophy, ethnology, and religion.  Over decades UW has developed a comprehensive collection of primary texts and secondary material in support of Russian and East Slavic folklore studies.  UW’s is one of the few libraries nationwide to hold the complete repertory of all books published in Russia from the 16th to 17^th, as well as in the 18^th centuries, reproduced on over 1,000 reels of microfilm. There is a large, representative collection of 19^th- and early 20^th-century Russian newspapers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the provinces.  Extensive holdings in pre-1917 Russian provincial history include the complete 19^th-century regional archival commission publications, regional newspapers sponsored by local governments or by local Orthodox Church authorities, and source materials such as those published by learned societies (e.g., the Imperial Russian Historical Society) or the complete papers of Russian sovereigns Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and others.

Russia in the 20th century is well represented by collections of official documents (treaties, legislative gazettes, Communist Party records), biographies and memoirs, historical, political and cultural studies, and by large collections of recently declassified archival documents detailing the inner workings of the Soviet government and Communist Party apparatus.

UW's representative Ukrainian and Belarusian collections include scholarly editions of the complete works of most major literary authors, most scholarly historical overviews, and both countries' leading periodicals in the social sciences and humanities.