Genrikh M. Deich Papers

This collection contains the research papers of Genrikh Markovich Deich (1913-2003), a Soviet archivist and historian known for his work on V. I. Lenin's Jewish ancestry and the Hassidic movement in Imperial Russia. 

It brings together typescripts, published works, unfinished projects, correspondence, notes and marginalia pertaining to the life and scholarship of Deich, who emigrated to the United States in 1989. 

Also included, notably, is Deich’s extensive personal collection of copies of nineteenth-century Russian government documents — internal memoranda, petitions, reports, and policy decisions —- on Jews in the Russian Empire. Until late Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR, these documents had been inaccessible to researchers. Deich photographed the bulk of these materials on a two-month-long trip to what is now the Russian State Historic Archive (RGIA, formerly TsGIA SSSR, in St. Petersburg) in 1991. He obtained official permission from the Archive's director to transport the copies to the United States and deposit one copy with the Chabad Lubavich Library in New York while retaining the second copy for his own research use. 

This portion of the collection consists of close to 90 files and hundreds of pages of documents. Some of the document copies had survived on microfilm only and have now been digitized for greater ease of access. Others are available as prints or photocopies and can be accessed on-site at Fung Library.