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The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) electronic reading room of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offers several primary source collections for the study of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the Cold War period. The FOIA Electronic Reading Room web site was established by the CIA "to provide the public with an overview of access to CIA information, including electronic access to previously released documents." Direct web access to the following collections is now possible: # The Soviet and Warsaw Pact Military Journals is a PDF collection of "sensitive Soviet and Warsaw Pact military journals from 1961 to 1984 providing a view into Warsaw Pact military strategy". # Preparing for Martial Law: Through the Eyes of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski is "a captivating collection of over 75 documents concerning the planning and implementation martial law in Poland from mid-1980 to late 1981. The collection release coincided with a CIA symposium honouring Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a member of the Polish Army General Staff and the source of the documents."

"The LBC/IRN Audio Archive, (London Broadcasting Company / Independent Radio News audio archive) consists of 7,000 reel-to-reel tapes in a collection that runs from 1973 to the mid-1990s. It is the most important commercial radio archive in the UK and provides a unique audio history of the period. This digitised collection focuses on the most noteworthy content - approximately 3,000 hours of recordings relating to news and current affairs. The digitised archive contains invaluable recordings of a wide range of broadcasts including coverage of the Falklands war, the miners' strike, Northern Ireland, the whole of the Thatcher period of government and recordings of the first hour of UK commercial radio including the first commercial radio news bulletin."

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation's web site offers "free access to the full texts of thousands of documents relating to the politics of the last quarter of a century".

The Kennan Institute and National Public Radio in the USA has established an online audio archive of Soviet and Russian history. "The archive consists of recordings dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet state. Included are the voices and speeches of key political figures, including Lenin, Kerensky, Kirov, Beria, Stalin, Gorbachev, and others. Among the recorded interviews are Anna Larina (Bukharin's widow); Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin's wartime interpreter; Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's widow; and Lev Pevsner, a survivor of the Leningrad Blockade. There is also on-the-scene recorded sound of many events in Soviet history, including: the Russian and American armies meeting at the Elbe; Stalin's funeral; the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. [...] The material comes from Soviet and Russian sources, the NPR archives, the archives of the BBC, and individual donors. Some of the material is in Russian, some in English. "