Documentary evidence project
Project Co-Directors:
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Academician Alexandr Oganovich Chubarian (Russian Academy of Sciences)
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Professor Arne Westad (Harvard)
Editors:
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Professor Vladimir Olegovich Pechatnov (MGIMO)
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Dr Svetozar Rajak (LSE)
The relationship between the UK and the Soviet Union was one of the key political and military relationships of World War II and the Cold War that followed it. Through the wartime alliance between the two powers it defined the outcome of the war against Germany and helped secure the defeat of the Nazi regime. But it also contributed to the increasing dissonance in the wider alliance and the tension that broke it apart. It is therefore very hard to understand both the results of World War II and the origins of the Cold War without studying the British-Soviet relationship in depth.
In 2004 Academician Alexander Fursenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences initiated a project to document British–Soviet relations during the Cold War. The British Academy, to which he turned for assistance on the UK side, asked Professor Arne Westad, then of LSE IDEAS, to help with putting together a team that could work on these materials in London. With the sad passing of Academician Fursenko in 2008, the project was held back for some time, until the prominent Russian historian Academician Alexander Chubarian, also of the Russian Academy, came to head it. With the assistance of dedicated teams in Moscow and London the part of the project covering 1943-1953 has now been completed. Read more.
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