This collection covers World War I and its immediate aftermath, concentrating on America's role in the Russian Civil War and early relations between the United States and the newly formed Soviet Union. Additional topics include Allied attempts to reopen the Eastern Front after the collapse of Imperial Russia, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Allied intervention in Russia, the Czech-Bolshevik conflict, the clash of the United States and Japan in eastern Siberia, and U.S. policy toward Russia at the Paris Peace Conference. This material is the result of decades of research by historian Betty Miller Unterberger, renowned professor of American diplomacy and international history at Texas A&M University, and former president of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
Consisting of approximately 10,000 documents pulled from over 50 repositories around the world, including the former Soviet Union, most of this collection is in English, with 80 percent of the foreign-language materials having been translated or accompanied by English-language abstracts. Much of this material has never been published before, and the opening of the Russian and Czech Archives in the early 1990s resulted in significant additions to this collection. Each document is preceded by a control sheet produced by Professor Unterberger listing the sender, recipient, date, repository, and a brief description.