Lane Rasmussen is Slavic Bibliographer and Social Sciences librarian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He can be contacted at rasmusse@vt.edu.

This "Slavic, East European, and Former USSR Resources" has been created by the Slavic Bibliographer over the past seven or so years and was formerly one in a series of subject pages sponsored by Virginia Tech University Libraries. That series no longer exists and now this page continues on as a private professional subject page.

Deciding what countries and areas I should cover was decided by striving for inclusivity rather than exclusivity. Also, I decided to make geography, rather than politics or social systems, or former social systems the main criteria. Nevertheless, the majority of the countries covered in this page are former Communist countries.

The basic dividing line I used for defining "Eastern Europe" was the "Stettin to Trieste" line referred to in Winston Churchill's famous 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech. However, I moved the line slightly west in the north to include the Former German Democratic Republic.

North of Stettin, I also moved the line of definition somewhat to the west. I travelled up the center of the Baltic Sea, to the west side of the Åland Sea, up the western part of the Gulf of Bothnia, the western edge of Sweden's Tornio River Valley (Tornedal; Tornionlaakso), through Norway's Finnmark, then north toward the North Pole to include Svalbard (Spitsbergen). Thus, virtually all of the Finno-Ugrian peoples are included in my definition of "Eastern Europe".

Then I traveled east to the tip of Siberia, taking in the Arctic Ocean islands north of mainland Russian Federation and other islands in the region currently part of the Russian Federation.

I then include the areas around the Kuriles, the Russian Far East, Amur River Valley, Mongolia, Kazakstan, and other new states of the Former Soviet Union in Central Asia, as well as adjacent areas of Inner Asia (Chinese Turkestan, etc). Inner Mongolia and former Manchuria, especially during the era of the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway are also briefly examined in this web page.

Traveling south of Trieste, and down the Adriatic Sea and then into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, I include Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and some adjacent areas of the Arab Middle East in my area of interest and study. Many of these places have mixed ethnic and religious populations as a result of immigration from the Caucasus Mountains regions of Russia and the former USSR and Russian Empire. Examples include the migration of Circassians to Jordan and Turkey, Armenians to Lebanon, Syria, and Former Palestine, and various Muslim peoples from other areas of Russia/USSR/Russian Empire to Turkey and other parts of the former Ottoman Empire.

Lastly, I include such ethnic groups as Kurds and Assyrians and "Chaldeans" (of the modern era) who, while at the present time lack nation-states/homelands of their own, are or were, scattered among other populations in the southern Caucasus, Eastern Turkey (Former Turkish Armenia), and other areas of the old Ottoman Empire now part of northern Iraq (old Mosul Vilayet), as well as northern Iran.

Thus, not only are the core areas of Eastern Europe and Russia of interest to me, but the adjacent fringe areas are too.

I also try to include other peoples of the area or former peoples, such as Roma (Gypsies), Jews (whether Yiddish, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Karaim, etc), Vlah, Yezidi, and others. I follow all the peoples examined in this web page into their various emigrations and dispersals.

Generally, this web page does not examine the past history of the area. While Scythians, Caucasian Albanians, ancient Alans, Goths, Ostrogoths, and others are of much interest, they are generally not examined here. Peoples, events, literatures, etc., of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century are the main focus of this page.

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