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Address/Telephone Directories from Russia
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This is a finding aid for telephone directories from the Russian Federation (Russia). These directories are primarily in the custody of the Collections Management Division (CMD) and most may be requested in the Main Reading Room, while some may be browsed in Alcove 4 of the Main Reading Room. (see Managing the Collections). A small number of directories are in the custody of the European Reading Room. (This finding aid indicates locations.) This finding aid was originally compiled to assist Library of Congress (LC) reference staff, and this is reflected in certain "quick-and-dirty" aspects of it production and maintenance. There are over 1,000 entries representing our holdings as of December 2007.
As a rule, current telephone directories (both residential and "yellow pages") are not cataloged by LC. However some older directories have been cataloged (some published during the Soviet era and some before1917) and can be located by searching the online catalog, by searching for the name of the city and using the subject term "directories". For some older directories, available on microform and not found in the computer catalog, it is necessary to consult with the staff of the Microform Reading Room.
Some of the directories listed in this finding aid are "organizational" directories (that is, similar to a "yellow pages" directory), others are residential, while a third category has both types of listings.
Many of these directories were published during the Soviet era, although the Library of Congress continues to receive new directories. Note that a fair number of residential directories are available even at the "raion" (district) level, although coverage is not uniform. (That is, for some parts of Russia the Library may have a number of raion-level directories for a particular oblast', krai, or republic, while for another it may have none.) Also, perhaps contrary to what might be expected, current residential telephone directories are less available for large cities than for small cities and towns. Apparently the cost of publishing such directories profitably is difficult in cities such as Tver' and Samara (to take two examples). No Moscow residential directory has been published for many years and neither has one been published for post-Soviet St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).
On the other hand, many cities now have residential directory information
available via the Internet. The best single compilation of Russian telephone
directory web sites is at Spravka.net 
(http://www.spravka.net).
(Searching of the web sites that Spravka.net points to will generally require
that the Internet browser is configured both to view and to allow entry of
Cyrillic characters as well as some knowledge of the Russian language.)
The records in this finding aid are arranged by city and then subarranged under each city by year, with the most recent appearing last. Where two directories were published in the same year for the same city, they are subarranged alphabetically. The fields contained in the records are as follows:
City (or region): All records contain an entry for this field. Most of the records have city names in this field, but some directories are for a particular region (generally an "oblast'" or "raion", in Russian), and such information will appear in this field. The city names are in Russian except for Moscow (for "Moskva"). City name entries correspond to the name of the city at the time of publication. In a very few cases, the city name in the title may not correspond with the city field entry - where an earlier name has been used in some directories even though it is not the official city name (for example, Viatka for Kirov).
Year(s): This will be the year most prominently visible on the individual item. This may or may not be the year of publication (i.e., a directory will often have one year in large print on the cover, and a different, usually earlier, year of publication elsewhere).
Title: This entry is generally taken from the title page of the directory. Some directories do not have title pages as such, if this is so then the "title" entry is taken from the cover. Some of the older directories were transferred to LC from other government agencies and are missing both cover and title page, thus they lack an entry for this field. Some of the entries in this field include the name of the issuing body (following a forward slash), where this would substantially assist the user in determining the coverage of the directory or otherwise provide clarity.
Type: Directories can be one of three types. "Organizational" and "residential" are self- explanatory, while "both" indicates a directory that contains both kinds of information.
Notes: This field can contain various additional information about the particular item.
Location: This indicates where the directory is kept at LC. The designation "MRR/GC" (Main Reading Room [open stacks] and General Collections [closed stacks] means that the directory should be requested in the MRR or browsed in MRR Alcove 4, Deck 46. The directories held in Alcove 4 are generally more current (within the last three years) than those in the closed stacks. EurRR means that the directory can be requested in the European Reading Room.
Note that this file is (and has been for several years) maintained as a finding aid for LC reference staff using various PC-based database software. Reflecting an intent to simplify the maintenance of this tool, no diacritics are present in these records. The Cyrillic text was transliterated using the standard LC transliteration scheme.
This finding aid was created by Michael Neubert and is now maintained by Angela Cannon. For further information concerning telephone directories from the Russian Federation held by the Library of Congress, please contact:
Angela Cannon,
Reference Librarian
European Division,
Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20540-4830
acannon@loc.gov
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