The Boris I. Nicolaevsky collection is perhaps the single most valuable holding in the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. It is the product of over forty years of collecting by an emigre Menshevik, who settled in the United States in 1940. Nicolaevsky's interests focused on the revolutionary movement in Russia, with particular emphasis on the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP).

The Nicolaevsky Collection includes the personal papers of such leading opponents of the Tsarist regime as Mikhail Bakunin, Petr Lavrov, Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov, Iraklii Tsetereli, Viktor Chernov and Lev Davydovich Trotskii. The holdings provide unparalleled documentation of the important nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutionary groups, such as the anarchists, populists, Social Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. They also cover political, social and economic conditions in Russia and the Soviet Union, Russian emigre life, the international socialist movement, and the important events of Russian history during the first half of the twentieth century.

Yale's Library owns virtually all of the Nicolaevsky Collections's 476 microfilm reels. Scholars can consult these sources in the Microtext Reading Room, which is in the basement of Sterling Memorial Library. A published guide to the collection is held both in the Microtext Reading Room and in the Library's Slavic Reading Room under call number Ref. Z2519 +H66 1991 (LC).

Sterling Library's hours of operation
LOCATION: SML, Microform (Non-Circulating)
CALL NUMBER: Film S2333