Anatol Shmelev

About

Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at Hoover’s Library & Archives, and the project archivist for its Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection.

Shmelev’s expertise is in twentieth-century Russian history, specializing in the Russian Civil War. As curator, he is principally responsible for acquiring archival materials relating to Russia, the Soviet Union, and the independent states that emerged from the USSR after 1991. 

Anatol Shmelev studied history at UCLA and UC Berkeley and received his PhD from the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, with a dissertation on the foreign policy of the Siberian government during the Russian Civil War. He has worked at the Hoover Institution since 1997. In addition to conducting his direct responsibilities, Shmelev has continued his scholarly engagement with Russian history, concentrating on information resources. His bibliography of Russian émigré military literature was published in 2007 by Norman Ross, following Tracking a Diaspora, a collection of essays on archiving the lives of Russian and East European immigrants published by the Haworth Press in 2006. Vneshniaia politika pravitelstva admirala Kolchaka, 1918–1919 (The foreign policy of Admiral Kolchak’s government, 1918–1919) was published by the European University Press in St. Petersburg in 2017. In the Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920, an expanded study of the foreign policy of the Anti-Bolshevik movement as a whole, was published by the Hoover Institution Press in 2021. In addition, Shmelev has written articles and reviews on various subjects connected with the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the postrevolutionary emigration.