“A Dirty Place for Americans to Be”: Images of the Russian Civil War in Siberia from the Robert L. Eichelberger Collection at Duke University Libraries

Abstract

The article describes the contents of a substantial and little‐known collection of Russian Civil War photographs currently held at the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. The images come from the personal archive of General Robert L. Eichelberger (1886–1961), Assistant Chief of Staff, Operations Division, and Chief Intelligence Officer with the American Expeditionary Forces in eastern Siberia, 1918–1920. The article analyzes the scholarly research value of this collection, which has been scanned as part of the Duke University Libraries digital collections project called Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia.